Moonlight Serenade, Vol I: They Can't Black out the Sun
by SianShanya
Summary: After DC, the Winter Soldier disappears, but not really. Steve does his best to leave well enough alone, but not really. A year later, Steve gets a call from the aforementioned Soldier concerning Hydra and a couple of superpowered teenagers, the Avengers find a certain Scepter, and Age of Ultron happens, but not really.
1. Kiss Me Thru' the Phone

After falling directly back into the MCU trash pit in October, when I finally mustered up enough excitement to watch Civil War, I'm trying my hand at writing a fix-it for Age of Ultron. Things that will not be happening in this include, but are not limited to; Pietro Maximoff as a shock factor, OoC writing(I hope), and weird revelations coming out of left field. Also no Brucenat. If you've ever wanted to read about Bucky adopting a pair of orphans in the middle of a global crisis, this is the fic for you.

If you've been reading my Star Wars fic and are currently mad at me for starting this while not having finished that, I am sorry. I tried, but the superheroes won't let me go. I WILL finish 'I Know', I swear.

* * *

 **APRIL, 2014**

Steve's been sleeping in Sam's spare room for just under a week when it happens.

Sam's gone, left after a short morning jog to meet one of his vets for coffee, and Steve's using the break from his friend's well-meant hovering to go by his old apartment and pick up his things, since he's pretty sure he won't be patching up the bullet holes in the wall, scrubbing out the bloodstains, and moving back in. It's not like he was ever attached to the brownstone to begin with. In fact, he reflects as he climbs the stairs to Sam's condo, he's not attached to much of anything. He's got a suitcase with his clothes in it, a couple of sketchbooks, a phone, and a laptop, barely even an armful of things important enough to keep from his home of two years.

There's probably something worrying in that, and it's why he waited for Sam to leave before he ran this particular errand.

It takes him a second to realize he's not alone in the condo, and another to put together that whoever it is, they know how to regulate their breathing so not even Steve's serum-enhanced ears can pick it out. By the time his brain figures out what that probably means, Bucky's already stepped into Steve's line of sight.

"I'm not-." His voice grinds to a halt and his eyes flick around the kitchen, assessing exits and sight lines, Steve thinks. "I'm not here to hurt you."

"I know." says Steve softly. "You saved my life." As he speaks, he lays his things down on Sam's table, keeping his hands as visible as he can. "You want a coffee?"

Bucky blinks at him, brows coming down in confusion, and Steve's heart twists in his chest at the vulnerability in his best friend's face. Abstractedly, he notes that Buck looks smaller in jeans and his grey jacket than he did in tac gear, although that might just be the absence of automatic weapons hanging off him.

"I'm gonna make coffee." says Steve, and he does, the easy, familiar motions like a balm on his mind. Without really thinking about it, he fixes one cup the way Bucky liked it in the '30s, with no cream but at least three sugars. He sets it down on the edge of the kitchen table and sits with his own. After staring at the cup for a moment, Bucky sits opposite him and wraps his hands, both metal and flesh, around the mug.

"You're Steve." says Bucky finally. Then, half a question and half a statement; "I knew you."

Steve nods. "We met in 1923." he offers. "At school, we were in the same class."

"I don't remember." mumbles Buck. "But I knew you, I know that." He takes a deep breath. "I read it, at the museum. But I know it too. My name's-" he cuts off, blue eyes cutting to the wood grain under his elbows.

"James Buchanan Barnes." Steve finishes. "Your Mamma named you after the president, thought you should have a real American name." Bucky looks back up at that, frowning.

"Doesn't sound right." Steve laughs, a short huff of air out of his nose.

"That's 'cause nobody ever actually called you James. Or Jimmy, either." He adds, because the thought jumps to his head and everything's sort of surreal at this point. At that, Bucky's frown gets deeper, an outright scowl, and when he speaks again, the words come right out of 1938 and punch Steve in the gut.

"Sounds like a name for a real piece of shit. Why."

Steve laughs again, but this time it's a little closer to hysterical than he'd like. His brain, it seems, is still catching up with the fact that this is actually happening. "There were two of 'em in our neighborhood, two Jimmys, and they were both real pieces of work. You used to say they were an offense to your good name." He takes a sip of his coffee and sternly tells himself to get it together.

"You-you called me Bucky. On the carrier." The corner of his mouth twitches. "That sounds right." Steve's answering grin is involuntary, and very wide. "Your friend will be back soon." Bucky says then, and Steve can feel the air shift. His grin fades. "I gotta go before then."

"Sam's good people, Buck, he wouldn't-"

"No, it's not that." Bucky interrupts, blue eyes full of conviction. "I can't stay here, Steve. I'd be putting you and him in danger. They're gonna be looking for me, and I can't trust myself around you." He sighs, and the fingers of his left hand drum against the mug, clinking against the ceramic. "My orders are still there, rattling around in my head." he says. "Being around you, it's hard to think sometimes. Point is, I'm dangerous, and I need to figure out how to be less dangerous to you before I can come back."

"You're here now." says Steve, knowing it's pointless. Bucky's always been stubborn, after all.

"Didn't want to just disappear on you."

"Okay," says Steve, "Okay. It's your choice. Just. Will you take my phone number at least? Let me know you're not dead every once in a while, maybe?" Bucky looks at him for a moment, like he's looking for something in Steve's eyes. Eventually, he nods. Steve writes the number down on a scrap of paper from his sketchbook. "The line's secure. If you need anything, I'll help, I swear." Bucky nods again, and reaches across the table to take the paper.

"I trust you. I don't remember why I trust you, but I do. I'll-I'll check in." He gets up, the movement smooth and graceful. "Don't do anything stupid, okay?"

Steve stamps down on the memory of a 70-year-old goodbye. "You either."

By the time Sam gets back, both coffee cups are washed, dried, and put away.

"Shit." says Sam, when Steve's stopped talking and started pacing across the living room floor. "You think he'll call?"

Steve shrugs, pausing a moment. "I don't know. I hope so. At least this way I know if he really needs help, he can call me." Sam sits for a moment, thinking. After nearly a minute, he looks straight at Steve.

"You gonna tell Natasha?"

* * *

 **JUNE, 2014**

Steve's thought about this for a long time, actually. Pretty much from the day of Nick's 'funeral' on. So by the time he actually finds a place in Vinegar Hill, he's spent hours thinking about it, between going to the VA with Sam and ducking the press. The problem, see, is they know he's in DC, and it's only a matter of time, in this century, before they, both the press hounds and Hydra, figure out he's staying with Sam. And Steve's not about to let his friend deal with all that, no matter how many times Sam says he's happy for it.

But even in the face of all that, it's still strange to be here, staring up at the refurbished old buildings. In the Heights, it might have been a brick façade, but Vinegar Hill is still recognizably Steve's Brooklyn, and the apartment building is brick to the core. He already knows, of course, that both of his old apartments are gone, as is the Barnes family place, long since taken over by the shops and cafés that litter the neighborhood today.

"You ready?" asks Sam, standing beside him because he's the sort of friend who will take on new age Nazis with you and then help you move. "'Cause I'm not entirely sure we're allowed to park the truck here, so we might not have a whole lotta time, you know?" Steve laughs at that and shakes himself.

"Yeah I know, all New York lives in fear of the meter." Steve hasn't brought much, but Sam helps him haul the frame and mattress he's bought upstairs, and they spend the rest of the day at Sam's new place in Harlem, unloading his furniture. Because Sam is apparently also the sort of friend who, when relocating because a 70-year-old Nazi death cult probably knows he's been harboring Captain America, decides they should move to the same city. Steve's not entirely sure what he did to deserve a friend like Sam, but he can't say it's not nice.

"I still feel bad."

Sam rolls his eyes. "I know you do, you're the world's nicest super soldier and all that." Steve glares at him, and Sam's brown eyes go all serious. "I mean it, man. You've never made me do any damn thing I didn't want to do." He grins suddenly. "Besides, Mom's so happy to have me back in the city, she'll probably send you a care package." Steve has to smile at that, so he flings a pair of balled up socks at Sam's head to cover it. He met Mrs. Wilson today when she'd come by with sandwiches at lunchtime, and he thinks Sam's joke is probably only a little bit of an exaggeration.

Once they've got Sam's boxes all inside, they order pizza and watch the Mets play on Steve's laptop. Sam, it turns out, is a basketball fan, but he's a good sport, and he barely laughs at Steve's intermittent yelling about the Dodgers at all. It is, Steve thinks only a little bitterly, by far the best day he's had since 1944. It's after 10 by the time he leaves, Sam promising to convert him to the Knicks come October. He makes his way to Midtown, because, through sheer refusal to shut up, Tony's convinced him to stay at the Tower for a few days, until he buys furniture. Even Steve can't find a way to feel like he's imposing, especially when he finds out Tony's done something as generous as it is absolutely nuts.

"You built us each a-"

"Floor, yeah." finishes Tony, since Steve's apparently not talking fast enough. "I had to rebuild after the whole alien thing anyway, and I figured, hey, I can afford it, right?"

Steve blinks. Thinks about mentioning that, all together, they've interacted with each other for about a week, and they'd gotten along terribly for most of it. In the end, he decides he won't. He's a bit of an asshole to this century's Stark, he knows, but he's pretty sure that observation would cross a line. He does decide, right then and there, that Howard Stark had, in all likelihood, had no business whatsoever having a kid.

"Anyway," says Stark as the elevator doors open, "this is yours, and it's pretty sweet, if I do say so myself. Pepper even stopped me from ordering the American flag wallpaper, you're welcome." Steve rolls his eyes, because it's what's Tony expects. It is nice, actually, lots of exposed brick in the walls and modern furniture in neutral tones. Also bigger than everywhere he's ever lived combined. "JARVIS doesn't watch or listen on the private floors unless you call him by name or the outer security is breached, and there's a kitchen and all here." Steve has enough time to walk through the two bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchenette and set his bag down before Tony's dropping a key into his hand and leading him back towards the elevator. As it shuts and starts to descend, he adds, "Also, still a little offended that you're not gonna live here, despite the very cheap rent offered."

"Tony, as generous as it is, and as much as I appreciate the offer, I can't imagine living in New York and not in Brooklyn. It's just home, you know?" At that, the mocking light leaves Tony's eyes.

"Yeah, I get it. Or, well, no, I don't, but I'm trying to be a team player, so I'll leave it alone. Still, you're welcome whenever. Barton and Natashalie promised to move in once they're back from the dark side of Europe, and Bruce already lives here, so you won't be stuck with just me, I swear."

Steve shakes his head and grins. "Aw, come on, Tony, I'm sure I can think of things worse than spending time around you. Maybe. Given enough time."

Tony claps a hand to his chest, because he's dramatic. "O Captain, my Captain, you wound me!" The elevator doors open on what looks like a common area as he finishes speaking, and he drops his hand in favor of wandering over to where a slim woman who has to be Pepper Potts is pulling takeout boxes out of a paper bag on one of the two massive couches. "Cap, Pepper, Pepper, our National Icon himself."

Pepper hops up from the couch and meets Steve as he comes in. "It's wonderful to meet you, Captain Rogers." she says with a wide smile. Steve is both surprised and comforted by the fact that she's wearing a Stark Industries t shirt, shorts, and no shoes. "I'd apologize for Tony, but you've already met him."

"Nice to meet you too, Ma'am. And please, call me Steve." he says, ducking his head. Tony, unconcerned at Pepper's jab, is looking through the takeout options.

"Sure, Steve," she says easily, "and please, I'm only 'Ma'am' to oily businessmen." Steve nods, follows her into the room itself, and waves at Bruce where he's curled up in a big cream armchair. The scientist waves back, smiling his warm, tired smile.

"Bruce, I found yours." says Tony abruptly, and thrusts a container in his direction, looking back at Steve. "Vegetarian, because he's secretly a rabbit." Bruce rolls his eyes as he leans over for the food.

"Tony, I have caught you eating my leftovers, don't pretend you don't like vegetarian food." Steve snorts, and drops into the other armchair, which is actually big enough for him to sit comfortably in. Absently, he wonders where Tony and Pepper found it, because he definitely wants one for his apartment.

"I'm sure you've already had dinner, Steve, but if you're hungry, I ordered plenty." Pepper gestures at the big paper bag. "I just got these two out of the labs half an hour ago." Bruce looks a little abashed, but Tony just shrugs, passes Pepper a container of her own, and digs out one for himself.

"No, I ate already, but I wouldn't say no to a glass of water." he says, more for something to do with his hands than anything else.

Pepper nods. "Sure! There are glasses behind the bar and a pitcher in the fridge. Make yourself at home." Steve pours his glass and returns to his original seat. The four of them sit and talk companionably as Bruce, Pepper, and Tony eat. Once they've all finished though, Tony asks the question Steve's been dreading since he got here.

"So. Those were some pretty interesting files that came out after DC. Hydra assassin?" Pepper levels a glare at him, but Steve's already opening his mouth. They're a team, after all, and a team trusts one another.

"Yeah. You know about my unit in the war, right?"

"Only heard stories about them every day as a kid. I was always pretty sure my dad liked you guys more than he liked Mom and I." Steve ups his earlier assessment to 'absolutely had no business raising a kid.' "Anyway," continues Tony, before Steve can apologize for Howard Stark, "What about it?"

"Well, Bucky, my Sergeant, he was my best friend, and my first combat mission was rescuing him off a Hydra lab table, along with the rest of my men. I didn't realize at the time, but Hydra was trying to recreate the serum that made me, and they at least partially succeeded with Buck." Bruce has gone very still, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Steve takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself. "So, uh, when Bucky fell off that train in the Alps, he didn't die."

"Shit." breathes Tony. "The Winter Soldier?" Steve nods, glad not to have to say it out loud.

"They-they experimented on him, replaced the arm he lost in the fall. He's strong, fast, has a healing factor like mine. Pierce sent him after me in DC, but Buck couldn't kill me. Saved my life after the helicarriers went down."

"Yeah, can I just say, really mad about that whole thing. I mean, who helped them design the damn things?" says Tony. "But no, no, their idea of a 'thank you' is to try and kill me. Nazis for you, am I right?"

"And now, he's probably in Europe, working through Hydra's network faster than Fury can find them." says Bruce, and Steve makes a noncommittal noise. Teams trust each other, but he damn well knows Buck's in Europe, unless he's moved in the last two weeks, and the fewer people know that, the better, for everyone involved.

"You planning to go after him?" asks Tony.

"I don't know if it's a good idea. He's okay enough to be going after Hydra, and if he wants to see me, he will." And he is thankful, so thankful, that they don't know him very well. That line would never have worked on Sam or Natasha.

"Well," says Tony, "I can't say any of that's good news, or that I'm totally okay with the assassin bit, but we're here for you. Right, Bruce?"

Bruce nods, slow and deliberate. "Of course. We're a team."

"I can't imagine how you must feel about this, Steve," says Pepper, "but if you need a friend, I'll be here." She takes Tony's hand and squeezes it, and Steve thinks, all of a sudden, that he might be in for more friendship than he'd originally anticipated.

After that, the conversation shifts to other, less charged topics, and Steve mostly just listens to Bruce and Tony argue good-naturedly over science, while Pepper sips at her wine and interjects with her own thoughts every now and then. They've just gotten into the finer points of a project of theirs when Steve's phone vibrates against his thigh. The number is blocked, which means exactly one thing.

"Hey, I'm gonna go upstairs. It's been kind of a long day." The two scientists don't even seem to hear him, but Pepper bids him goodnight. Steve waves, makes his retreat as casually as he can, and answers the phone as he unlocks the door to his apartment. "Hey," he says, feeling his voice drop back into the cadence of home.

"Hey, Stevie." Bucky's rough voice crackles over the phone. "Still alive. How are you?" Steve grins, leaning against the wall of bulletproof glass overlooking the city.

"I'm in Manhattan, Buck. Got the keys to my new place today."

"You're livin' in M-Manhattan like some k-kinda swell?" The stutter had shown up the first time Bucky called, and he gets good and bad days as far as talking goes. Bucky hates it, hates dropping words and getting stuck in the middle of his thoughts, but apparently, it's pretty common with brain injuries.

"Nah," snorts Steve, "just staying at Stark's a few days while I get furniture and all. The apartment's in Brooklyn, down on Bridge. What've you been up to?" Buck refuses point blank to talk about where he is or about how he's very obviously spending most of his time killing Hydra operatives, but he'll tell Steve about the more mundane aspects of being on the run. Assuming, of course, he can string the words together, which is a real 'if.'

"Remembered about summer in Brooklyn." he says, soft and a little shy, like he always is when he mentions his memories, because he's always afraid his brain is making things up. "Sitting on the fire escape after work, listening to records and watching the sun go down while you sketch. Did-did that h-" and dammit, Steve can feel the tension ratchet up, and he wants to bring Arnim Zola back to life so he can kill him himself. Eventually, Bucky sighs into the phone, a rush of static in Steve's ear and says, with feeling, "Fuck a _goddamn_ duck. Sorry, it's not shapin' up to be a great day for talking."

"'S'okay, I knew what you meant." says Steve, making sure none of his clenched fist makes it into his tone. "Yeah, we used to do that a lot in the summer. It was always too damn hot to sit inside." He grins, remembering. "You used to stick your cold beer bottles under my shirt, too. Nearly fell off the top of the fire escape a coupla times, trying to hit you for it." Bucky doesn't really laugh, but there's another rush of static like he's snorted, and Steve'll take what he can get.

"Well, good," he says. "I'd hate to think I dealt with a three-hour migraine to get more of my brain's bullshit." Which is a thing that happens. Because of course it is. "And-" he pauses again, gathering the words. "The girls. They're my-sisters? Or cousins? Bex and L-L-" There's another pause, long enough that Steve thinks Bucky's just going to hang up. Eventually, though, he takes a deep breath and asks, voice tight, "What's the name?"

"Lucy. Your younger sisters."

Grudging, "Thanks. Lucy. They begged us to walk 'em down to P-P-Prospect Park every day."

Steve smiles again at the memory of Bucky's sisters, their matching dark hair in braids, Lucy a miniature version of Bex, begging with her big brown eyes, "Bucky, please, it's so nice out-"

"Yeah, your Mamma wouldn't let them walk by themselves until Bex turned 14." He chuckles. "Lucy was a manipulative little thing, she knew damn well no one could resist her puppy-eyes."

"I-I remember," Bucky's voice is hushed, and Steve's heart breaks for him. "My sisters. Have you-are they a-" his voice cracks and drops out on the last syllable.

"Lucy is," says Steve, forcing his voice steady. "She lives in Chicago with her daughter and a bunch of grandkids. I, uh, actually saw her, summer before last." Steve had visited after the Battle of New York, met Bucky's nieces and nephew and spent an evening telling edited Howling Commando stories to the kids. Had spent the next morning with Lucy, drinking tea and crying at her kitchen table.

"Jesus," murmurs Bucky. "I don't know what answer I actually w-wanted." Another sharp exhale into the phone. "How fucked-up is that, huh?" Steve opens his mouth to say-something, something reassuring, but Bucky beats him to it. "But sh-she's happy? G-g-got a good l-life and all?"

"Yeah, Buck. She was married 60 years, has two daughters, Molly and Emma, and a son named George." One of her granddaughters is named Jamie, but Steve doesn't mention that.

"Good, that's-that's good." On the other end of the line, then, there's a sharp, insistent beeping noise. "Shit," snaps Bucky. "I gotta go. I'll call again when I can, okay?" On Bucky's end there's a sound that's almost definitely a gun being rapidly reassembled, and Steve tamps down on the worry that creeps into his heart. Bucky is perhaps the most dangerous person on the face of the earth, he can take care of himself.

"Sure, Buck. I'll have plenty of shopping to complain about next time."

"Pick up a s-sense of style while you're at it, Old Man." And the line goes dead before Steve can make a comeback. He glares at the phone.

"Asshole."

Yeah. He's thought about it a lot, and New York is a good decision.

* * *

A/N: So yeah. Join me on a journey through the trash pit. I swear it's not gonna be this dialogue-and-feelings heavy all the time. Also please leave reviews. Reviews fuel my soul and muse.


	2. I Come With Knives

**A/N:** Welcome back to Age of Ultron: Mark II. Last time, Bucky promises to stay in contact with Steve after TWS, and also starts a one-man war on Hydra. Steve and Sam move to New York in order to Avenge. This time, the Winter Soldier has a Day™, and Steve gets a call and goes haring off into the sunset, in true Steve Rogers fashion.

* * *

 **APRIL, 2015. THE CZECH REPUBLIC.**

The weather is a sniper's dream. Not a breath of wind, clear but not sunny enough for glare, and cool out. It's mid spring, finally starting to warm out of the eastern European winter that smothers this part of the world for more than half the year. The Winter Soldier appreciates winter, of course, but as a matter of personal comfort, Bucky prefers warmer weather. He's been flat and motionless against a ridge for the past six hours, cataloguing the guard shifts at the lab that, until around 1400 yesterday, had been a carefully guarded secret. He's been after this base for months, it puts out new and terrifying weapons at an alarmingly fast rate, and there are scientists here, doing _Hydra's good work._

So, naturally, he's going to kill everything he finds inside and then blow it to hell. A sharp, nasty smile twists his face at the thought.

He stays there until dark, getting real familiar with the movements of the guards and personnel, and then he suits up, out of sentry mode, into _holyfuckingshitit'sthefuckingSoldier_ mode. Knives wherever he can get them, his matched SIG Sauers strapped to his thighs, the obnoxious but way-too-much-fun-to-leave-behind Skorpion clipped between his shoulder blades, and, because he finally managed to acquire it last week and he's been looking forward to using it, dammit, the M21. No C4 needed, Hydra bases all have suicide switches, but where can you go wrong with a few(dozen) grenades, right? Finally, he tugs his tac goggles over his head and straps the mask on. He has an image to maintain, after all, and it makes him look scary, and since he threatened a Russian gear designer into a new one, it doesn't cover his ears anymore either. Fucking Hydra.

The moon is well up, casting the rocky valley in dim, silvery light. Not ideal sneaking conditions, but he's not the most accomplished assassin in the modern world for nothing, and he slips across the open ground between the ridge and the base's truck entrance without a sound. Then, he waits the 90 seconds remaining before shift change with his back pressed against the outer wall, in the camera's blind spot.

The door slides open right on time, and the Soldier grins behind his mask. Showtime.

The replacement guard gets a heavy, rubber-soled boot to the chest and goes flying. The guy who's been on shift gets a bullet to his unprotected neck, and drops with a gurgle. The Winter Soldier looks up at the camera, flashes a backwards V for Victory, and stalks into the base, M21 held loose against his body. Hydra soldiers come boiling out into the hallway, bristling with body armor and guns. The Soldier huffs a laugh to himself, because it's just so damn much like the Front. He empties the M21 into the crowd, twisting and ducking around bullets, and then drops it and draws his handguns. He'll pick it up and reload later if he has time, but this is a _production_ and it's most effective if it's seamless.

By now, the soldiers he hasn't already killed have gotten into close quarters with him, and the fight takes on a little more grace. He slams his knee into a black-clad chest, hears ribs crack, and snaps his foot into the man's thigh, just in case the ribs weren't enough of a deterrent. You never know, with Hydra. As he jerks an unfortunate Nazi against his chest to absorb bullets, left arm wrapped around his throat, he hears the intercom crackle, something German about attack and 'Hail Hydra.' The Soldier rolls his eyes. He throws the now very dead soldier against two of his fellows, and follows up with two head shots with the SIGs. There are four left now, and they hang back, warier than their dead comrades. Whatever. He can move. Two are just that terrified, and he drops them before either can get a shot off. The other two are too still, too relaxed to be scared. And as he gets closer, one of them draws a knife.

That's fine. The Winter Soldier has knives, too. He holsters the handguns and draws two, just to be thorough, and they dance. The last mook is watching, for now, and the Soldier has to pay attention to him because there's something sinister in how calm he is. Knife-guy is fast, too, faster than he should be. Not like St-like the _Captain_ , but fast enough to hold his attention and draw the fight out, which is not something he needs just now. He grits his teeth against the _havetobeperfectcannotfailcannotfail_ in his head and deliberately blocks two inches too low when the guy slashes at his leg. The blade doesn't go all the way into his thigh, only an inch or so, and it gives the Soldier the opening he needs to lunge forward at his own full speed and rip the shorter of his two combat knives through Knife-guy's throat. Blood sprays in a pressurized arc from the severed carotid, and splashes, hot and iron-and-salt, across the Soldier's face. He lets the guy go. Knife-guy drops like a cut marionette, and the Soldier spins in time to avoid the knife the last Hydra soldier flings at his face, dropping a hand to the blade in his leg as he does so, tugging it free and sending it at his opponent in one smooth motion. Hydra Mook #1 steps back, all efficient movement, to avoid it.

 _Shit._

"Soldier," he says. American English. "You are very far off the reservation." The Soldier barks out a laugh.

"Oh, you have no fuckin' idea, pal." It comes out all Brooklyn drawl, which is where his shredded personality has been all day, so really not that surprising. Brooklyn doesn't stutter, at least.

"I think the Baron will be ecstatic to have you back." The Winter Soldier rolls his eyes again. As if Strucker had ever ranked high enough to have laid _eyes_ on him before DC.

"I'm sure he would, pal. Unfortunately for the both of you, I got a job to do here, and it doesn't include gettin' reconditioned." And, because he's in a showy mood, he aims a flip kick at #1 to start off. Mook blocks his boot with a sturdy, armored forearm. The Soldier bounces off and lands only to spring at him, slashing at his chest with the knife in his right hand. Abruptly, a wickedly curved-scythe? appears in the guys' hand, and the knife blade screeches along its edge. Undeterred, the Soldier snaps a kick at Scythe's knee, but the guy twists away before he can make contact.

And then the Winter Soldier smells the ozone in the air. _Fucking hell, I hate electricity,_ is what he has time to think before the lightning has grounded in his left arm and shot through the plates. Luckily, Hydra isn't actually _stupid_ and his arm is insulated at the shoulder joint, so he just ends up with a twitchy and slow limb, not serious burns and probably a panic attack. But fuck, is he so not a fan of this fight. So not a fan, in fact, that he retrieves one of his grenades and flings it at the motherfucker's ankles. It goes off with a spectacular bang, and gives the Soldier enough cover to up the output on his left arm's reactor to compensate for the short. He's going to pay for the extra power later, but for now, he needs the strength. As he jams the burned plate back in place, he hears the scrape of boots on cement, and spins in time to block the fist that's flying at his face. The man's injured, a little slower than before, and the Soldier presses that, throwing out combinations as fast as he can, making fuck all sure Hydra Mook has no time to fire the current in the scythe again.

The Soldier pushes him slowly back, further into the base. From experience, he knows any other soldiers will be in the labs, protecting files and scientists. He needs to end this before he goes down there. With that in mind, he disengages from Mook #1 and draws the Skorpion, intending to find out if that scythe is bulletproof. This time, his ears pick out the reactor-hum well before the scythe can fire, and by the time white-blue energy races into the space between them, he's in the air, curling in on himself and rolling, firing a burst from the pistol. Mook turns, but not fast enough, and catches two in the gut. He staggers, the Soldier lands, pivots on his right foot, and slams his left into the guy's wrist, forcing him to drop the weapon. From there, it's a simple matter of putting a bullet into his forehead, and it's over.

Asset-1, Hydra Mook-0. Well, alright, .25, his arm's still a little twitchy.

One of the very, very few good things about being a mostly successful Hydra science experiment is that the Soldier has a pretty good layout in his head of the average Hydra base. This one doesn't deviate much from the norm, and so he finds the labs with minimal effort and blood. The doors are thick cement, but a grenade takes care of them. He stalks through the smoke, a walking nightmare, a horror show come home. There are only two guards down here with the mad scientists, and they go down before they even see him, a neat bullet in each forehead. These particular excuses for humanity are braver than some of the others, not even one tries to beg for their life. One tries a command word, she murmurs, "Слушайте, Порожняк, слушайте." at him, hands out and placating.

The words drag at his brain, making his hands drop a fraction before he clenches his fist hard enough to make the joints hurt, and the pain gives him something else to focus on. She dies first, bullet to the head. He does the rest with his hands. Wastes fewer bullets that way, and none of them are fighters.

The computers are all down here, yay, no more finding today, Soldier. The suicide switch is easy enough to rig, but he leaves it for the moment, in favor of looking through the files they haven't managed to delete. Its. Pretty worrying, actually. Like maybe-he-needs-to-call-someone worrying. There are mentions in the files of an 'alien object' and 'serious progress made with Subjects 4 and 5.' Also a heavily encrypted file titled 'Project Hecate' that he does not like the look of, thank you very much. That, he puts on a USB drive, because happy is the super soldier who doesn't get caught off guard. Crive safely in his tac vest, he activates the explosives laid into the walls, and starts the 10 minute timer.

Then, he sees the two heat signatures in what is definitely a detention block.

 _Oh, for fuck's sake._

He sprints, which, for him, means he gets to the deepest sublevel in under a minute. The lock is heavy and computerized, but that's what grenades are for. The thick, hot metal groans horribly as he hauls the door open enough to squeeze through and finds himself in some kind of lab/prison combo. Fun. There are several cells, but only two of them have living things in, and oh, Jesus, they're just _kids._ Bucky shoves the tac goggles up onto his forehead and unbuckles the mask so it hangs 'round his neck. Kids. _Fucking_ Hydra.

"Hey, hey there. It's a person under here, I promise." He says, soft and slow, moving toward the cells. The girl is the first one to move, she shrinks back into the corner of her little room, pupils blown wide. The boy stays where he is. He reminds Bucky of the skinny, starving dogs that skulk in alleyways everywhere, hoping not to have to move too much, but ready to bite if they need to. Bucky makes a shooing motion at him, and the boy steps away from the door of his cell. His eyes don't leave Bucky as he sinks into a brace position, draws back his left hand, and sends his fist through the reinforced plexiglass window. The girl flinches violently, hands flexing around nothing. Before he can break the lock itself, the door snaps open with a screech of metal on metal. He catches a flash of red light as it opens, and files that away for later. She's enhanced, has to be. Probably the boy too, from the way the ends of his floppy hair have gone silvery white. Bucky breaks the lock on his door with a little more force than strictly necessary, and the kid slips out. He goes immediately to the girl's side, wraps her in his arms. She's shaking, fine tremors running through her little frame.

"Outside, come, we have to go," he says, switching to Russian. The boy looks up.

"I can take us outside," he says in the same language. There's a southern burr in his accent, but Bucky can't place it off the top of his head. "I'm fast, I just need to hold your necks so you don't get whiplash." Bucky shakes his head.

"Take her if you want, and meet me outside, but I c-can't do people touching me where I can't see 'em." Fuck, the mission headspace is wearing off. The boy narrows his eyes at Bucky, then scoops the girl, sister, they have to be siblings, into his arms and is _gone,_ a silver and black blur. Bucky sighs and takes off after him at his own pace. He still has more than five minutes after all. Plenty of time.

Sure enough, they're all three of them up on top of the ridge when the base goes up. Buck thinks the fairy tale landscape is much improved already, even if there's a big smoking hole in the ground. The girl is watching the smoke curl with something pained and angry in her brown eyes. Neither of them can be older than 16. Bucky feels a little sick, looking at them. He shoves the goggles and mask back into his duffel, along with the Skorpion and one of the SIGs. He leaves the knives be, but he strips the bloodstained tac vest off and pulls a hoodie on over his t shirt. Then, he switches his attention to patching himself up. Fuck, out of the mission, his leg hurts like a sonofabitch, and he can feel the beginnings of neural feedback from his jury-rigged left arm. By the time he's done cleaning his blood off his hands, the kids are looking at him instead of the ex-Hydra base.

"I'm James," he says softly. "Where are y-you from?" He's surprised when it's the girl that speaks first.

"I am Wanda. This is Pietro, my brother. We are from Novi Grad, in Sokovia." Sokovia, shit. It's not far, but it's war-torn and a fucking wreck and he hates to leave them there.

"You have family there?" His answer is in the way her face falls, but the brother, Pietro, answers aloud.

"We have nothing." And shit, he's gonna have to ask Steve if he'd ever brought kittens in from the rain back in Brooklyn. He has the sneaking suspicion he had, more than once.

"W-w-well," says the Fist of Hydra, "not anymore."

 **APRIL, 2015. NEW YORK.**

Steve is bone-tired, and sore as anything because _lasers,_ for Christ's sake. All he wants to do is get through this debrief, take a hot shower, and sleep. Looking around the room, the rest of his team looks about the same. Thor is his usual cheery post-battle self, but Nat and Clint are nearly in each other's laps, Tony's got his head in his hands at the other end of the glass conference table, and Bruce is wrapped in a zip-up hoodie that's at least two sizes too big for him. Curled up in his chair, he looks like a fluffy, bespectacled cat. Across the table, Nat catches his eye and gives him a tired smile, white against her sand and sun-stained face. He smiles back at her, and feels another wave of relief that they'd gotten to Sudan in time to help her. Good as she is, she's not cut out to take on Hydra by herself, and he's very sure he can't handle losing any more friends.

With a flash of shame, Steve realizes he's missed a couple of sentences of Fury's voice and drags his head back to the briefing and his eyes back to the holographic display.

"-found it at 0600 this morning, ashes still hot. Intel points to it having been a Hydra lab." he says.  
"I don't know about you all, but I'm getting a little tired of being behind." Steve, who is in fact not tired of it, doesn't say anything. Bucky's made an art out of beating Fury's European boys to every single Hydra outpost by an average of about three hours.

"I don't know, Nicholas, maybe he's doing you a favor." That's Tony, bless him. For all his annoying habits and utter lack of anything resembling boundaries, Tony's a good guy to have in your corner. Clint snorts.

"Not like there's anything you can really do about him, other than step up your game," he says. "As a fellow assassin, though, props to him. That's what, like fifteen bases he's worked through in the last nine months? All with no survivors."

"All until now, anyway." says Fury grimly. "The base was blown to hell, but the detention level was buried pretty deep, stayed more intact than the rest." Pictures flash up on the display, a lab with cells, the locks and doors of two of them broken in. Steve's stomach twists with nausea at the sight of the tables. "There's nothing left of the base's files," comes Fury's disembodied voice. "We can't know who was in here, but I for one am not comfortable with how little we know about the Winter Soldier's agenda." And then, then, Steve's done.

"He has a _name,_ Fury. And unless I'm mistaken, he hasn't done anything your men weren't going to do anyway since DC." he snaps. "I know you think my judgement's off on this one, but from where I'm sitting, you're pissed off because Buck's doing your job for you. Now, maybe there were prisoners there and maybe there weren't, but I know Bucky, and he's not going to attack your men or us. If he was, he'd have done it already, all he'd have to do would be stick around for a few hours after hitting a base." He glares around the room. Tony looks kind of stunned, Natasha's watching him, a worried look in her green eyes, Thor's observing, and Clint leans back in his seat, crossing his arms across his chest. Bruce nods.

"He's not wrong, Nick. Remember Belgrade?" he says, in his best, most I'm-a-highly-educated-and-sensible-person voice. Fury's face reappears on the monitor, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Yes, Dr., I remember Belgrade."

"Where else could that intel have come from? The Winter Soldier dropped that lead to us, and we were able to stop Hydra before they could blow the capitol building. I'm not saying we should bow out of Europe, but he hasn't been a threat to any of us since he broke programming more than a year ago. Steve's right."

Fury scowls, but doesn't argue, and Steve figures that's the best he's going to get.

"Right," says the former director eventually. "I'm meeting with a potential lead tomorrow afternoon, I'll call Maria if there's news. Get some rest, you all look terrible. Fury out." The image vanishes into thin air.

"Good call, team," says Steve. "Get cleaned up, get some rest. We'll meet in the morning in case Hill has something for us." They nod, and begin the process of hauling tired, sore limbs off to showers and beds. Natasha, though, waits for everyone else to leave, and gets close enough to him that even Jarvis won't be able to hear her.

"When's the last time you talked to him?" she asks.

"Two weeks ago," he answers, barely above a whisper. "I've told you, he won't talk to me about-"

"No, I know that. How was he, though?"

"Normal enough. We talked about how weird the future is for a few minutes, but he hung up early, said he had a headache." She's worrying at her lower lip with her front teeth, so Steve asks, "Why? What's got you looking like that?"

"It's just," she sighs. "It's maybe nothing, I can be paranoid, but." she sighs again. "He's efficient. Really efficient, and fast. To do what he's been doing, he's _brutal,_ Steve. And yeah, it's Hydra, but I know how hard it is to break out of the headspace where you can do anything, _be_ anything to get the job done." She looks up at him, green eyes full of worry. "And if he was robotic and inhuman on the phone too, then I'd actually be less worried. But he's not. He's something else for you, Steve. And I don't know if he's that fucked up, if he can be that divided, or if he's pretending to be a person for you."

"You're worried about him?" she snorts.

"Steve, I'm worried about all of it. Him, you, us, hell, Nick's people in Europe. Brainwashing is really, really nasty stuff, and it has a tendency to have a lot of fallout. And I don't know enough, don't have enough intel to predict how bad the fallout's going to be here. It could be as easy as him showing up at your door one day, jumpy and traumatized, but okay. Or it could be worse. The worse is what I'm worried about. Just. Be careful, okay? Please."

"I will." She turns to go, and Steve reaches out to catch her wrist. "Nat, I'm glad you're all right." She smiles.

"You and me both, Rogers."

The shower is phenomenal, and Steve stays under the spray for nearly an hour, letting the heat leech the ache out of his muscles. Clean, dry clothes feel nearly as good, and Steve fully intends on sleeping for at least twelve hours, but before he can collapse into bed, his phone goes off. Blocked number.

"Hey, Buck."

"S-s-steve," comes Bucky's voice, "I-I need your help." And all the sleepiness in Steve's limbs vaporizes.

"Sure. What do you need? Money?" There's a quiet huff of laughter.

"No, champ, little more difficult than that. Can you g-get to Romania?" Steve's heart clenches, but his voice is steady and sure.

"Of course. You want Cap?"

"Shit, no. Steve. Just you. You r-remember how to find me?" Steve nods, knowing Bucky will hear the rustle of his hair against the phone.

"I'll be there in, say, five hours?" A Quinjet can do that, and he can borrow one.

"Ok-k-kay. Be careful." He hangs up. Steve throws on jeans and a t shirt, grabs his jacket and a ball cap, and takes off.

Maria finds him a jet, and, while she stares at him the whole time, brown eyes calculating, she doesn't ask where he's going. He guns the jet's engines as soon as he's out of the Tower, and keeps them as open as is safe all the way across the Atlantic.

He's in Bucharest by dawn, and he heads to the largest train station in the city, finds the lockers, and paces up and down the rows until he finds the one he's looking for. Locker number 18, combination 11-17-23. They'd actually made all this up as kids, reading spy novels. They'd do a dead drop, just like Agent 47, leave it at the 18th locker at the train station, for the year they'd both been born, and the combination is Bex's birthday, November 17th, 1923. Bucky'd added the part about the biggest city in a country a few months back, when they'd talked about it on the phone. Sure enough, the locker opens under his hands, shedding flecks of blue paint as it does so, and there's a notebook inside. Written on the first page is an address and instructions to say hello after knocking. Because Bucky knows his voice. Steve smiles, and wonders what his 12-year-old self would have thought of all this.

The address is a ramshackle old building, but it's inhabited, Steve nearly runs into a middle-aged woman on the stairs. Buck's door, he notices, has a new doorknob and hinges. He knocks twice, says, "Hey, it's me," and rocks back half a step. He hears the deadbolt disengage, and the rattle of a chain, then a soft,

"Come in." He does, and finds Bucky leaning against the wall of the tiny studio apartment. It's not nice, but it is clean, drawn curtains and a bed in the corner a kitchen and a table, at which is seated-oh.

"Meant to a-ask you," murmurs Bucky, jerking his chin in the direction of the two skinny kids at his kitchen table, "I ever adopt the little kittens that used to c-c-creep around-" He takes a deep breath. "Gimme a sec. Our. Our building." Steve can't help the laugh that bubbles out of his chest, half hysterical and half real.

"Yeah, actually, you did. Every time there was a storm. Your Mamma hated it." Bucky's mouth twitches up in something that's trying to be a smile.

"See, I th-thought so."

* * *

A/N2: See, I told there'd be less dialogue next time. Also, Bucky Barnes in the middle of a fight is my new favorite point of view. Also, any inaccuracies between my Bucky n' Steve and MCU canon's is more than likely purposeful. Like the year they were born, for example. Canon is a box of scraps in a cave, and I pick and choose what I please.

What will our intrepid super soldiers do next? Where were the rest of the Avengers while Steve was haring off into the sunset? Find out next time on: "Age of Ultron: Mark II!"

Please leave reviews. They fuel my soul and muse.


	3. Barton Hollow

**A/N:** Previously, on 'Days of our Supersoldiers': Bucky rescues the Maximoffs from Hydra and calls Steve for help. The Avengers all live in New York.

Next, on 'Days of our Supersoldiers': The twins meet Steve. The Avengers meet the Winter Soldier. Sam meets James Buchanan Barnes.

* * *

 **APRIL, 2015. BUCHAREST, ROMANIA.**

The kids are watching Steve, haven't taken their eyes off him since he walked in. They're definitely siblings, maybe even twins, both skinny and too young to have been through what they have. He's obviously making them nervous, so he does his best to be nonthreatening, keeping his hands in plain view and telegraphing his movements as he walks into the apartment. After a moment of consideration, he sits down on the floor instead of the little threadbare sofa, hoping to put them at ease. Bucky watches him drop to the floor and raises an eyebrow, but he doesn't comment, just says, "They're, um, not the biggest fans of English right now. You speak any R-russian?" Steve ducks his head and shrugs.

"A few words here and there, nothing conversational." He's picked up a little from Natasha over the years they've worked together, but most of it is swearing or old proverbs.

Bucky looks over at the siblings, and says something low and soft. Steve catches his name, and the word for 'friend,' and the girl tilts her dark head to the side, attention still on him. She fires off in rapid Russian, the end of the words coming up in a question. Bucky answers her in that same soft voice. Whatever has been exchanged seems to satisfy her, she sits back in the rickety chair and some of the wary fear is gone from her face. Bucky says something else, a question of his own, and after a moment, they both nod, and lean into each other across the table, but neither of them stop watching Steve. Bucky nods back, then crosses the room and sits opposite Steve on the floor, just out of arm's reach. This close, Steve can smell blood on him, and hopes, in a really macabre way, that it's not his. No such luck, though, now that he looks, Bucky's got a strip of dark fabric wrapped around his left thigh, and Steve can just see the frayed edge where his combat fatigues are ripped.

"Their names are Wanda and Pietro. They're orphans, f-from Sokovia. Hydra picked them up, they're not sure how long ago, but it was at least a couple of years. Country still had a president last time they were there."

"I saw the pictures from the lab you hit last night. Where they were kept." Bucky's mouth tightens.

"I didn't know they were there. Just happened to find them, locked up and scared. They don't have anywhere to go." His left hand flexes, with an unpleasant metallic grinding sound. "They're so fuckin' young, Steve."

"Do you know what Hydra did?" Bucky raises his right shoulder in half a shrug.

"Some, yeah. They already had abilities. Wanda says she could get impressions from people, know if they were trustworthy. Pietro's not sure, he thinks he was m-maybe a little stronger than a standard human." Steve nods.

"And Hydra?"

"Don't know how they did it, but Pietro's faster than I can track, and she broke the lock on her cell door with her mind. Don't know what more she can do. Her control is-not great, as far as I can tell. 'S'part of why I need your help." He stops, takes a deep breath, and meets Steve's eyes for the first time since he walked in. "They trust me because I got them out, took out the bastards that were hurting them. I can't just take off and leave 'em somewhere, they're not normal kids. But. I don't trust myself not to hurt them if-if-" his left hand clenches again as he hunts for the words. "flashbacks." he says finally, voice tight with frustration.

"I gotcha." Steve wants, very badly, to reach for Bucky's hand, but he doesn't. "And you don't know what all Wanda can do, just that she can't control it. Yeah, I can see where that would be worrying."

"Right," says Bucky. "So I can't leave them, but I don't want to hurt them, and you're the only person I trust who can probably stop me." Steve huffs a dry laugh and rubs at the back of his neck. "Sorry," Bucky ducks his head, gaze skittering off over Steve's shoulder.

"Nah, it's just," Steve shakes his head. "my life is really weird, you know?" That gets him a humorless smile in return.

"You're tellin' me, pal." He looks up then, back to the twins. Pietro says something in Russian, pinching the hem of his shirt, which had probably once been white. Come to look, all three of them are pretty grimy. Bucky nods in response to whatever Pietro's said, and rises from the floor. He crosses to the bed, reaches under, and comes out with a black duffel bag that Pietro eyes apprehensively. Bucky catches the look, and though Steve can't understand the words he fires over his shoulder, he thinks, by the tone, they're a dry joke. Sure enough, Pietro and Wanda both laugh, looking startled. The bag has clothes in it, and Bucky tosses them each a clean shirt, adds something else in Russian, and then goes back to sitting across from Steve on the floor. Wanda gets up and disappears into the other room of the apartment. Ah. Shower time, then.

"They were waiting on you to get here before they'd leave each other's side." says Bucky, switching back to English.

"Well," says Steve, "all three of you could use a shower, so I'm glad I passed the test."

"Punk," says Bucky without heat. "We got here less than an hour before you did. Took longer than I wanted to get out of the Czech Republic." Suddenly, his face twists into a grimace, right hand going to his left shoulder. Steve leans forward on instinct.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, it's nothing, just neural feedback, it got a little electrocuted last night." Ignoring Steve's expression, which is probably very horrified, he retrieves the duffel bag and pulls out a pair of handguns and a cleaning kit. Both guns are disassembled and arranged in parts on the floor in front of him before he speaks again. "So. What are you going to do?"

"About you?" Bucky nods without looking up from the gun he's cleaning. Steve sighs. "Well, nothing's gonna be easy. I can take a break from Cap, pass the shield to Sam for a while, but if I do that then we'll be on the run, all of us, makes it a lot easier for Hydra to pick us off with no backup, and I'm not as good at the underworld as you. The other option-"

"New York," murmurs Bucky, still not looking at him.

"Yeah, New York. I'd have to tell the team. But we'd have access to a lot more resources and a more stable environment for the twins." The first SIG Sauer goes back together with a series of metallic clicks. Bucky gets about halfway through cleaning the second before he says anything else.

"New York."

"Yeah? I know that's gonna be rough on you, Buck." He shrugs, and fondness wells up in Steve's heart for his self-sacrificing martyr of a best friend.

"Yeah. I-it's not ideal, for me, but they don't deserve safe houses and cheap shit food." He pushes the slide of the second SIG closed and lays it and its partner back into the duffel bag. "Let's go to New York. I don't think I can h-handle Stark Tower, though." Steve huffs in mostly-real amusement.

"I can't always handle Stark Tower, either, pal. What about my place in Brooklyn? That way at least Fury won't find out for a while."

"I would appreciate Fury not knowing. I d-d-don't think he's my biggest fan." Steve grins.

"That's 'cause you do his job better than he does."

"They handled Belgrade all right. S-speaking of, I have something that someone should probably see." It's a USB drive, black and engraved with the Hydra skull and tentacles. "Found it on their computers, it's a project they were working on. Encrypted nine w-ways to Sunday."

Steve nods. "I'm sure Tony can crack it."

"That's the kid, right? Stark?"

"Yeah. I should call him, check in and bring him up to speed. You okay with that?" Bucky shrugs his right shoulder again.

"Not really. But it's p-pretty unavoidable, so go for it."

Stark picks up on the fourth ring.

"Where the hell are you."

"Romania," says Steve, unapologetic. "Something personal came up."

"Well, something came up here, too. We're on our way to Sokovia, got a lead on the scepter and Strucker."

"Damn. Good intel?"

"Yeah, got a call from Coulson bringing us in. Said he tracked some scientist in. You're not coming, are you?"

"I've kind of got a situation here, Tony."

"Yeah, three guesses says it's tall, dark, and deadly with a sniper rifle."

"I'm sorry I can't make it. If you need help on cleanup-"

"No, you're good, Cap. Intel points to it being pretty short staffed, mostly techs and science nerds. We've got Thor, shouldn't be a problem."

"Thanks, Tony."

"I'll cover you with Coulson and Fury, but you owe me one, Rogers."

"More than one, I'm afraid. I mentioned a situation."

Tony groans. "What is it?"

"Two enhanced teenagers rescued from a Hydra base last night. They don't have anywhere to go, no family left, and they don't trust anyone but Buck."

"And you're bringing the whole party to New York, aren't you." It's not a question.

"They're gonna stay out in Brooklyn with me. But I'm not turning any of them over to Fury or Coulson. Mostly I just want to give you a head's up."

"Right. I did promise I'd help out with this shit, didn't I?"

"Tony, you don't have to-"

"Oh, shut up, Rogers. We'll be out of the country 'til this probably 1600, local time, but after that, you should be good to bring the jet back. I'll keep not-so-former-Agent Hill downstairs."

"Thanks, Tony."

"Uh-huh. I gotta go, we're coming up on our drop zone. Say hi to your platonic life partner for me, huh?" And then he's gone. Steve sighs. His life is something else, all right.

After Bucky and the twins have all showered, and Steve's run out to the nearest store to get Wanda some clothing that actually fits her, Bucky explains the plan. A lot of Russian flies between the three of them, but by noon, the twins are on board with relocating to New York. Wanda even asks, in halting English, where they'll live, prompting Steve to pull out his phone and show her pictures of his apartment. That earns him a big, bright smile from the girl, and Steve can't help but smile back.

The jet he borrowed is an older one than the Avengers', and Pietro surprises him by taking the co-pilot's chair, while Wanda and Bucky settle on the narrow benches against the fuselage. Pietro watches everything Steve does with marked interest, so Steve explains a few maneuvers as he flies. Pietro pays perfect attention until he's done talking, and then starts asking rapid-fire questions and doesn't stop until they're over Greenland. Steve can hear Bucky and Wanda talking quietly, in Russian and a few words of something that isn't, though it's still Slavic. At one point, she raises her hands, showing off her gift. Red light flickers along her fingers, twisting along the joints and playing off the fuselage. It's beautiful, her power, even if none of them understand it.

They make New York at around 1800, local time, just as the sun's sinking behind the skyline.

"It's got. A giant 'A' on it.'" Bucky sounds amused. Steve smiles, equal measures fond and exasperated, as he so often is when talking about Tony.

"Obnoxious, isn't it?" Beside him, Pietro laughs.

"It is ugly building, too." he comments, still smirking. Steve's grin grows. He likes this kid, dammit.

As promised, there are no high-ranking former SHIELD agents around, or anyone, for that matter. Once they disembark, though, Steve's team, plus Rhodey and Sam, file in through the door that leads to the gym and training rooms. Behind him, Steve can hear the plates in Bucky's arm shift, the sound oddly arrhythmic. Wanda's foot scrapes nervously against the floor, and when Steve flashes a reassuring smile at her, he sees she's standing half behind her twin while he glares, his distrustful mask back on. This is going to be uncomfortable, Steve just knows.

"Thanks again for understanding, guys," he says, stepping forward to keep some distance between the nervous enhanced humans behind him and his team. "I'm sorry I missed it." Sam claps him on the shoulder, his wide, cocky grin in place like there's nothing out of the ordinary happening. Steve could kiss him, he's so grateful.

"Don't worry, man, I filled in for you. Hydra guys had no idea what hit 'em." Steve smiles at him, then turns as he hears Bucky's footsteps on the floor behind him.

"Guys, this is James Barnes, my friend." Bucky's got his hands shoved in the pockets of his hoodie, and he shrugs his right shoulder by way of greeting. Steve can see gears turning in Clint's head. The whole damn room feels charged, and Steve momentarily wishes they'd just said to hell with it and gone on the run. Tony takes a step forward from where he's been standing half behind Thor, arms spread.

"Well, I'm Tony. Good to meet you, Comrade." The last word is said in a horrible Russian accent, and Steve levels a glare at Tony. Before he can tell him off though, Bucky's speaking, his voice horribly flat, the closest to the Winter Soldier's monotone that Steve's heard since the Beltway.

"I think I killed your parents."

Being a full-time combat veteran and a part-time superhero, Sam is incredibly familiar with the way time moves in a fight. So, when it slows to a crawl in the wake of Barnes' words, he has plenty of time to panic as Tony's eyes go from confused to shocked to crazy frothing pissed in a fraction of a second.

Then, several things happen at the same time.

Tony throws a wild, off balance punch, and Barnes leans out of the way. Rhodey lunges forward and catches Tony around the waist, holding him back as Natasha slips in between the two, her back to Barnes, and Clint lays a hand on Tony's shoulder. Rhodey's murmuring something in Tony's ear now, too soft for Sam to hear. By this time, everyone else has caught up with the words that came out of Barnes' mouth, and the kids are both on a wire, ready for a fight. Steve's reaching for his friend, but Sam grabs his forearm and shakes his head, because the absolute last thing this situation needs is an escalation. After what seems like ages, but is in reality maybe five seconds, Tony stops straining against Rhodey, and he and Clint haul him back towards the door. Bruce follows them, shooting a look at Steve that says they'll be having a talk later.

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose.

"Well, that was a damn mess." he says. Natasha shrugs.

"Could've been worse. At least he didn't have a suit on." Sam refuses, utterly, to think about that potential situation, because hell no. She casts a significant glance between Sam and Barnes, then walks over to where the kids are standing, both looking at Barnes with wide eyes. She says something soft and Russian, and they relax a little.

"Buck," That's Steve, arm still held out to the side. Belatedly, Sam realizes he's still holding it, and releases him as Barnes sinks to the ground, arms wrapping 'round his bent knees. A fine, near constant tremor runs through his right hand and he's staring right through the floor. Just like that, all Sam can see is a fucked-up veteran, and so he sinks into a crouch a foot or so from the world's most prolific assassin.

"Hey, you doing okay there?" Barnes' head snaps up, his pale eyes piercing.

"You're. From the Insight carriers. Wings."

"Yeah, man, I'm Sam. Nice to meet you." Barnes exhales sharply, a bitter noise Sam's heard before, from Steve. Huh. Maybe it's a '30s thing.

"Really?"

"Well, circumstances aren't perfect, but one slash to my 'chute back in DC and I'd be dead and gone. I'm still here, so yeah, it's still nice to meet you." This time, the exhale is a lot closer to being a laugh.

"Okay," he says, but his tone sounds more like 'you're crazy, man.' "James B. Barnes, nice to meet you, too."

Steve sits down then, a few inches more than arms-length away from Barnes. Sam's proud.

"So. That was kind of sudden, Buck." Pale eyes go back to the ground.

"I know, I'm s-sorry. But he deserves to know."

"You really do it?" asks Sam. Barnes shrugs, still staring through the floor.

"I think so. Can't remember actually killing them, b-but I do know there was a mission in the '90s that I n-nearly failed. H-hesitated. They kept me out of cryo for a few weeks to r-r-r-" he cuts off, takes a deep breath, and finishes with, "to make sure it didn't happen again. Still have scars from that p-particular lesson." His left hand clenches, and the plates grind together with a metallic groan. Sam winces. "Howard and Maria were killed in '91, they're the only people I'd have known that were imp-portant enough to Hydra for them to break me out."

And then Sam puts together the word James hadn't managed to say, combined with the fact that Steve has been gut shot and healed with no scarring, and wants to throw up.

"So you didn't want to kill them?" That gets him ice-blue eyes, fully present and burning into his.

"Didn't want to kill any of them. 'S'not how Hydra works."

"Well, all right then. That's you square with me, J.B. Can't tell you about Tony, though." James shakes his head.

"He has plenty of right to b-blame me. Like I said, he d-deserves to know."

"Jesus, Bucky," murmurs Steve. "It wasn't your fault."

"No," he answers, eyes dropping back to his hands where they're laying atop his knees. "but it was me."

Before Sam can say anything else, Natasha's back, strolling over to Sam's pile of sad super soldier "Hate to break this very uplifting conversation up, boys, but Steve, you need to know the results of today's raid." Her words get Steve up off the ground, at least, back in Team Leader mode.

"The scepter?" she nods.

"Yeah, the scepter and Strucker. INTERPOL's got him now. We also found files on your new friends, who were supposed to be transferred to Sokovia yesterday afternoon, and the carcass of one of the chitauri worms. Bruce and Tony think they were trying to fuse bio-organics with artificial intelligence, using the scepter to do it. Thor's taking the thing back to Asgard on Sunday. 'Til then, it's in the lab, Tony and Bruce are going to do a little research with it before it goes back." She casts a look at the kids. "It could also explain how Hydra managed to give those two their powers."

"Could be." Steve says absently, looking down at Barnes, and dear God in Heaven, they're having an entire goddamn conversation with just their eyebrows. It hits Sam, then, that the two men have known each other for almost their entire lives, discounting cryostasis and brainwashing. He's never seen so much expression on Steve's face. After nearly thirty seconds of entirely silent arguing, Barnes rolls his eyes, gets up and holds out a USB drive with a red skull and tentacles stamped into it.

"Found this on the Czech base's hard drive. Encryption's a little much for me, but it looked n-n-nasty." Natasha takes the drive. Barnes squints down at her "I- I shot you." There's no guilt in his tone, he's just looking for confirmation.

Natasha nods. "Twice." Barnes' brows come down, and his voice is a growl when he speaks again.

"Odessa. Where else?"

"DC, last year. On the highway, you put a 50 caliber round in my shoulder after I shorted your arm out. And shot you. In the face." She's not guilty either, Sam notices.

"Sounds like you earned it, Natashenka." Her chin jerks at the variation on her name and she frowns, but doesn't comment. Sam pushes his questions back for the moment. He can ask her later. She might even tell him the truth.

"I'll take this down to Tony later, once Rhodey and Clint are done with him. You four should probably go to Steve's, though. It's not gonna be comfortable between you and Tony for a little while. Oh, and Steve, there's a party Saturday night. You have to come, people who matter are invited." Steve inclines his head.

"I'll be there."

In the end, Sam goes with them to Brooklyn. He can tell Steve is shaken by Barnes' revelation, even if he tries to bury it. Besides, Sam is good with kids, always has been. Wanda and Pietro, as they introduce themselves, are quiet at first, but they perk up in Brooklyn. Wanda loves Steve's place, she goes straight for the big bay window in the living room, and her fingertips glow a gentle red.

"It is beautiful here," she says simply, when Sam comes over to stand beside her. "The lights are like stars."

Sam orders pizza, which gets him further into the twins' good graces, even if Pietro picks all the peppers off his. Barnes doesn't eat, but he does sit with them in Steve's kitchen with a glass of water. Sam gives up on trying to observe him subtly the third time he gets caught. The guy can probably feel eyes on him at this point. He doesn't look great though, there are deep shadows under his eyes, and he's definitely lost weight since DC. His metal arm makes a soft, stuttering noise every time the plates shift, too, so once Steve's put the leftovers away, Sam asks about it. Barnes glares at him for a moment, but he does answer.

"Got a little electrocuted in the Czech Republic," he says all casual, like that's a normal thing that happens to people. "Haven't had time to fix it yet."

"Well, you got time now." In answer to the renewed blue glare, he adds, "Hey, man, you've got nothing to worry about. I'm pretty sure you could kill me with one arm if you needed to."

And that's how he ends up sitting at Steve's kitchen table and helping the Winter Soldier replace the fried-out parts of his left arm. ("I can't reach the plates on the back. If you fuck with anything, I will stab you.") It's pretty fascinating, actually. Sam's no stranger to field maintenance on small, complicated motors, so although the arm is way more advanced than his pre-Stark wings, he gets the gist of what he's doing. When they're done, Barnes can flex his hand and realign the plates from shoulder to wrist with no nasty sounds or twitchy fingers, and the twins are both asleep in Steve's guest room, Wanda in her leggings and one of Steve's running shirts and Pietro in borrowed US Army sweats.

"You want me to stay tonight?" he asks Steve, while Barnes is changing.

"Not unless you want to bunk with me. Everything else is kind of taken." Sam laughs.

"Hey, I'm secure enough in my masculinity to cuddle with you, Rogers."

"I wouldn't commit to that." And that's Barnes, coming back into the living room with a spare quilt and one of Steve's pillows under his arm and a toothbrush in his mouth. "He's a g-goddamn octopus, always has been."

Sam stares at Steve.

"What? No. No, Sam, we were poor kids in the Depression, we couldn't afford heat-it's not-dammit, Buck!" He's glowing red. This is the best day of Sam's life. Barnes' eyes are wide, comically innocent.

"What, punk? You tryin' to d-d-diminish what we had now? I'm hurt, Stevie, I really am." Sam cracks up.

"This is great," he says, still cackling. "You, J.B., are officially my favorite person ever." Barnes looks surprised at that, but after a moment, he takes the toothbrush out of his mouth and smirks.

"Aw, thanks. You ain't so bad yourself." And then Sam gets _winked at_ by the Winter Goddamned Soldier.

* * *

 **A/N:** Before anyone gets scared...I adore Tony Stark and I will not be villainizing him here. I do maintain, however, that had the whole team been in Siberia at the end of Civil War, things would have been different. Let me know what you think, even if you're just yelling at me. Reviews are the twins discovering authentic NY pizza.


	4. Oh Darlin' What Have I Done?

**A/N:** Previously, On _All My (Enhanced) Children:_ Bucky adopts a pair of Hydra experiments, moves to New York with Steve, and causes some Avengers Drama™ because that's how it goes when you're a former Hydra assassin and Tony Stark's involved.

* * *

 **APRIL, 2015. AVENGERS TOWER**

Tony lets Rhodey half carry-half lead him out of the hangar, because it's either that or throw another punch. As soon as there's several inches of opaque metal between him and Barnes though, he shoves away and goes for the elevator. Alcohol. He needs alcohol. And Pepper. But Pepper's in Malibu, running his company and she won't be back until next week. Clint and Bruce don't follow, but Rhodey does, because Rhodey's seen this before and he knows Tony like this is a great way to end up with a lot of property damage.

 _I think I killed your parents._

The thing, see, is that Tony's always wondered. It's not like there weren't a lot of people who hated Howard Stark enough to kill him. Yeah, Howard used to drive too fast and after too many drinks and the road was dark and bad and all of that, but some little part of Tony has always, always wondered if the accident had been more like an 'accident.' If Obadaiah's grief had been laid on just a little too thick. If, if, if. And it had only gotten worse after Afghanistan and Iron Man, once he figured out just how deep and dark the world's corners got. And now, it turns out, that little paranoid screaming corner of Tony's head was right. That his father had pissed off Hydra enough to bust out their secret super soldier assassin.

He's actually kind of proud of the old man for that.

"Tony," says Rhodey softly, as he's pouring scotch in his penthouse apartment.

"What?" he snarls back. "What are you going to say? It wasn't him? He didn't have a choice? I've heard all that shit before, I don't want to hear it again." He tosses the scotch back and pours another.

"No," says Rhodey, calm and a way better friend than Tony deserves. "I was going to say 'let's get very drunk and talk about our feelings', actually." And he reaches for a glass of his own.

So they get drunk. They get very drunk and Tony does a lot of yelling and then some dropping his head into his hands and crying. And it's not the best way to deal with his problems, maybe, but it does mean Tony gets to be detached from it all for a few hours.

That's worth the price of a headache the next morning. Of course, he wakes up the next morning and Steve's best friend still murdered his parents, so there's that, too.

On to Unhealthy Coping Mechanism Number Two: Engine work.

Clint finds him downstairs, maybe a few hours into the engine bloc of a Chevy that's as old as he is. Aside from ear shattering music, which he hasn't really been able to listen to since Afghanistan, it could easily be a scene from 2007.

"You, uh," says Clint, very eloquently, from his spot in the doorway. Tony buzzes him in and holds up one hand as he comes in.

"Nope, this is my workshop, and it has a very strict 'no feelings' policy. Talk Chevy or get out." Clint drags a stool over.

"'S'a real pretty thing, ain't it?" he gestures at the engine. "That whole, um, thing there, with the little rods and all." Tony actually laughs at that, just a quick huff.

"Okay, okay, Barton I'm gonna stop you right there because you're actually hurting my soul right now. Like real pain." Clint throws his hands up.

"Hey, I'm an assassin, not an engineer. You wanna get technical, ask me about shot angles and the best kind of anti-glare gear." He watches Tony replace two piston rings before he says, "You gotta talk about it, man. And you gotta do it sober."

"And so you drew short straw?" Clint's hand snaps out and catches Tony's wrist, making him look up from the Chevy.

"No, for some reason, I thought I might be the best authority around to talk about brainwashing. And, I thought that might be a thing you might want to talk about. You know. For some reason." And then Tony feels kind of bad for snapping at him, so he wipes the grease off his hands and turns to face his teammate.

"Look, Barton, I appreciate you coming down here. I really do, we're all one big happy team thing and all that. But I'm not gonna call the CIA on Barnes or kick Steve off the island, so you really don't need to do the whole ledge-talking routine, okay?" Clint sighs and rakes his hands through his hair in frustration.

"Tony, I'm not here to talk you out of calling the CIA. I'm here for _you._ Because aside from being this team's resident brainwashing victim, I'm also our foremost expert on grieving for somebody you weren't actually all that fond of." And oh, shit, Tony'd forgotten about Barney. It was in Barton's file, of course, the whole nasty shebang. From the parental abuse to the circus to the marble-losing and murder rampage and finally, to the fact that Clint himself had almost definitely put his big brother down. And yeah, Clint probably does get it, more than anyone here who isn't Rhodey, and Tony's already taken up enough of Rhodey's time with his bullshit. Clint takes in his expression and just says, "Yeah. So if you did want to talk about it, or even if you don't. I'd. You know. Not judge you and all." Tony's wringing the grease-stained towel between his hands, he realizes just then.

"It's just. I just never got along with him. He was never around, and when he was he spent as little time at home as possible. And mom, she did her best, but she wasn't. She wasn't a great mother, really. You know I spoke mostly Spanish for like three years at home before she figured it out. Learned it from the nanny." Clint shrugs.

"Yeah. When I went to school the first time, I could barely talk. Between my home situation and the fact I couldn't hear shit, nobody could understand anything I said." He taps at his hearing aid as he speaks. "It took them a real long time to figure out I was deaf and not just stupid, but that's Iowa in the '80s for you." Tony shakes his head. What comes out of his mouth next is a damn secret no one other than Rhodey knows. But he's in it already, already dancing around it, and Barton, he thinks, will probably understand.

"I-When I got the call from the hospital. When I heard they were dead. I was never actually sad about it. Or-anything about it, really. All I remember feeling was resignation. Like I'd known it was coming and the call was just a courtesy." Sure enough, Clint nods.

"I've been there. I always knew my dad was gonna drink himself to death, so when he did, it wasn't so much sad as it was liberating."

"But now," says Tony, "now I know it wasn't the drinking or the driving too fast. Somebody did it to them, and now it's all different. They're still just as dead, and just as shitty, but I can't help but be pissed about it now." Clint shrugs at that, leans forward and tugs the poor grease rag out of his hands before he tears it.

"So be pissed. Nothin' wrong with that. Just-just make sure you're pissed at the right person, okay?" And Tony's mostly sure he is. There's no file from his parents' murders in Natasha's leak. He might not ever know who ordered it, but he can see it in his head, a faceless older guy in a suit and tie, muttering about 'operational security' and 'knows too much.' But he also sees Afghanistan and he feels the water in his lungs, the shorts in his car battery life support, and he thinks _how could you just break for them?_

But he knows, he _knows_ that's fucked up, and outside of the actual moment, hearing Barnes' words, he can't even give voice to it, let alone act on it. So he doesn't.

Instead, he teaches Clint the basic anatomy of a 1970 Chevy Chevelle engine as he puts it back together, and then he gently kicks the archer out and does some repair work on the suit he'd taken to Sokovia yesterday. God, that had been just yesterday. Once he's exhausted all his little projects, he goes upstairs and calls Pepper, just to hear her voice and hear her say she'll be home next Wednesday. He'll tell her about this shit when she's back, she's busy right now and he's not actually having a crisis.

Then, Jarvis says, "Sir, Agent Romanov went to considerable effort to leave file on your desk earlier this evening."

There's an encrypted USB drive and a sticky note on the top, partially obscuring the Cyrilic script, and Natasha's written: _This is your eyes only. Come find me when you're done._ She's signed it with a little heart, God, she's terrifying. Tony reads it while the drive is decrypting. He reads it cover to cover and then he flips it shut and shoves it away and cusses Natasha out in his head because she _knew_ this would happen, goddammit.

As it turns out, there are some things not even Tony can get mad at, and the shit in that file means that James Barnes is one of them. And the drive means he has to go and _talk_ to him about it, because hey wow, alien artifact and artificial intelligence.

 **APRIL, 2015. BROOKLYN.**

For one terrifying second after he jerks awake, he can't remember where he is. The sounds trickling into the apartment tell him it's a city, and he can hear breathing, sleep-deep and even, and then he remembers. Hydra base. Twins. _Steve._ New York. Sam Wilson. He goes through the litany over and over, until the part of his head that's screaming at him to _getupkilleverythinggetOUT_ shuts the fuck up. Then, he forces himself to sit back down, sheathes the knife that's made it into his hand, and checks his phone.

0247\. He's been asleep for almost three hours, which is. Not bad, actually, for being in a new place. The fact that his body is still repair- _healing, the human word is healing, Barnes-_ itself probably has something to do with it. He gets up, intending to prowl around Steve's building and make sure it's secure and not under surveillance. Because Steve, big trusting lug that he is, almost definitely wouldn't notice and it's not like Bucky's going back to sleep tonight anyway. Unfortunately, that plan gets kind of derailed when his head spins and his vision goes fuzzy before he even gets all the way up off the couch. Because _fuck,_ between combat and the twins and the plane and the fact that he's a fucking crazy person who can't always relax enough to eat in front of other people, it's been more than 48 hours since he's had anything other than water, and his metabolism isn't happy with him. At all.

There's still food in the apartment, but panic is still scraping at the edges of his mind, and he knows from experience the best way to get it to calm down is to _move_ , feel fresh air and reassure his head that he's not actually in a Hydra lab, even a really nice one with a sinful comfortable couch. Besides, the whole fuckin' _apartment_ smells like Steve, and while it's not exactly unpleasant-the opposite, actually-, it's also not helping him calm down.

And this is Brooklyn, too. Changed a lot, he thinks, but there's something familiar in the streets, in the very bones of the city, and it calls him back, and it doesn't matter if his memories are still more empty spaces than not. It still feels like home here, even though he hasn't been back since 1942.

It's also full of 24 hour diners, and one of the few constants of the modern world is that at 0300, nobody really wants to know what anyone else is doing out of bed. Sure enough, the unfortunate girl working the graveyard shift shoves his soup and coffee at him with the barest of smiles and goes right back to reading a magazine at the register. They're both pretty shitty, but also unlikely to make him sick, which is Bucky's first priority when it comes to food. Hydra'd built him to blend in on long assignments, so he can, in theory, eat just about anything, but he's learned through painful experience that it's better to play it safe on an empty stomach.

By the time he's paid and left the girl a nice tip, because he might be a mass-murderer, but he's not an asshole, his brain's back to baseline levels of paranoia and his left shoulder is starting to ache from holding his arm stiff on the counter like it's a normal prosthetic, so he goes back to Steve's. The top floor apartment is really nicely situated, and also ridiculously easy to break into. They're gonna have to talk about that. He shins easily up the fire escape and around to the balcony, whose door is fucking _glass, come on, Steve,_ and finds that he's not the only one awake anymore, despite it now being 0335.

Wanda's settled cross-legged on the ground in front of the balcony door, and she waves at him as he slips back inside.

"Hope you d-didn't get up 'cause of me." he murmurs, pulling the door back to. She shakes her head.

"It is quiet here," she says. "In the lab, there are always people doing things outside. Guard changes, experiments." Her little hands ball up in her lap. "Now, everyone is asleep. It's-quiet." He thinks it must be nice, not to be hyperaware of _everything,_ of four heartbeats and four sets of lungs and four potential threats and _fucking shut the fuck up, you paranoid bastard, we are NOT going there_.

"Not so quiet," he says instead, sitting down on the arm of the couch because it's got better sight lines than the floor next to her. "If you listen, you can always hear sirens, car engines." She looks at him, eyes catching the light from the moon as she turns.

"You're right," she whispers. "I slept, earlier. But I woke up and now-I close my eyes and I see their faces, their masks. I hear my brother's screams in my head. I-I can't go back to sleep." She hunches in on herself, face crumpling. Bucky doesn't even think about it, just slides off the arm of the couch, wraps an arm around her shaking shoulders and lets her cry, rubbing circles into her back like he used to do for-someone anyway, this feels familiar and he sure as shit hadn't done any comforting for Hydra.

The irrational, batshit parts of his head are back to panic within two minutes, but they're not loud enough to make him move, not yet, and she scoots away before they ever get there, pretends she doesn't see how his free hand is shaking with the effort of not pulling a weapon. More support for his theory that her powers involve some kind of telepathy. A theory she confirms, point blank, when she looks at him from under her eyelashes, and says, shy and sad, "You are scared of me." Bucky has to laugh, dry and very, very bitter.

"No, kid, I'm just fuckin' crazy, there're parts of my brain that'd be scared of _b-butterflies._ 'S part of my charm." He knocks his shoulder into hers. "'You're about five foot nothing and a strong wind'd knock you over. Who'd be scared of you, huh?" She smiles, not her big bright one from earlier, but a little one anyway. He'll count that as a win. "I don't know about you, but this floor ain't exactly comfy, and there's this real nice couch right here for the taking. You coming?"

She curls up on the couch next to him, and eventually worms her feet under his leg. When he raises an eyebrow at her, she shrugs and mumbles, "It's cold in here." It's not, not really, but it's honestly really nice to have another human being actually want to be in his personal space, so he lets her be. A few minutes later, she's asleep. He smiles, and tucks the throw blanket over her, then settles into sniper stillness to keep watch as the sky lightens.

Steve's smile, when he comes in just after dawn, is sunshine and swing music and _home_ and it twists Bucky's heart.

Like the bones of Brooklyn, that hasn't changed either.

Me: I've got something to healthily and nonviolently communicate to your BFF _._ Is that allowed?

Star-Spangled Man: Ha ha. Come by in about half an hour. You want me there?

Me: That's a resounding no, Captain Intrusive.

Star-Spangled Man: If you're sure.

Tony sighs, glaring at his phone. Of course he's sure. This is going to be awful enough without Steve's sad eyes in the mix. Besides, he's reasonably sure Barnes isn't going to snap and kill him. He drives to Brooklyn, partly because he's Tony fucking Stark and he doesn't take the subway, and partly because it always calms him down. Even driving in New York, which is probably not a good indicator of his sanity, but he's never claimed to have a great hold on that anyway, so who cares?

As expected, there's no one but Barnes in the apartment. He unlocks the door and by the time Tony's got it open, he's on the other side of Steve's kitchen bar/island thing, leaning on his elbows and watching Tony like a hawk.

"Steve said you wanted to talk to me." Tony nods and breezes in, because if there's one thing he knows, it's how to cover awkward with bravado. He washes up on the other side of the kitchen, leaning against the brushed surface of the fridge.

"Yep. I decrypted your drive. Also, had some time to think about you and Hydra and my parents." Barnes shifts, suddenly self-conscious.

"I-"

"No, no, I'm talking now. Natasha left your file on my desk last night. And I had some time to kill, so I read it. And, just so you know, as soon as this conversation is over, I'm going to do my damnedest to forget I ever saw it, for my own peace of mind." Barnes snorts. "Because, as someone who has been tortured, I can now say that I have no fucking idea what that was like. And-I have no right to judge you for Hydra's crimes, because there is no way in hell you had any choice in any of-that." He takes a deep breath.

"So. I'd apologize for trying to hit you, but it was honestly so embarrassing that I'm just going to pretend it never happened. And I am now resigned to having two World War Two war heroes around to perpetually disappoint."

"Why would you be disappointing." Huh. That's unexpected.

"Well, you knew the original model, right? I've been informed I don't live up so well." Barnes frowns at that.

"I've known you for five minutes and I already like you more than I liked Howard. Jesus, your shirt alone would make me like you more than I liked Howard." Tony looks down. Hey, Sabbath for the win.

"Wait. Wait, wait, wait. You know Steve thinks-"

"Yeah, Steve liked Howard a lot. Between the serum and the gadgets, he felt like he owed him, too." Barnes interrupts. "I, on the other hand, spent kind of a lot of 1944 daydreaming about decking Howard in the face." Tony blinks, at a loss for anything other than, well,

"You are the first person who has ever said that. Ever. In my entire life, I have never, ever heard anyone say that about my father." Barnes shrugs.

"He was an obsessive, fancy swell who cared more about science than people. At least, that's what he was like when I knew him. So no, I didn't like him. But. I would _never_ have shot him." And that, that Tony believes. All of his rationales and his determination to be the good guy about this are gone, burnt away by surprise and all he's left with is _Bucky Barnes hated my old man._

Oh, Jesus. He's going to _like_ this guy, isn't he?

"Well, hey, that makes two of us, Russian Winter."

Barnes looks a little thrown by his tone shift, and he says, "I'm not Russian." Or at least, that's what Tony thinks he says. His doesn't actually understand Russian, but everybody who's ever seen a James Bond movie knows the words for 'no' and 'Russian'. Tony cackles.

"Rogers is gonna _hate_ this. I can already see his Disappointed Stare, oh my God." Then, he has an idea. "You like mechanics? I seem to remember some snippet from the never-ending Captain America stories of my childhood that involved you and cars." Barnes side-eyes him, hard. A knife has appeared in his hand, seemingly out of nowhere.

"You can't touch my arm, Stark." Tony flaps a hand dismissively.

"Not even what I was going for. Although, sad, because I bet I could do better than evil science Nazis and let me know if you change your mind. I was talking about car engines though." The knife doesn't go away, but Barnes is playing with it now, flipping it back and forth along his metal knuckles. Tony's not even sure he realizes he's doing it, which, not exactly comforting, but better than out and out threatening.

"Yeah, I was a mechanic for the Navy Yard before I got d-drafted. 'M not sure I remember any of it, though."

"Psh, muscle memory, my friend, you'll be fine. Or something. We're gonna have a great time. Also, what do I call you? Other than Russian Winter, I mean."

"Um. James is okay, or Barnes, if you w-want. Or I was Yasha for a couple of years, that's alright, too." Ah. So only Steve gets to call him Bucky, then. Another point for Tony's 'Steve Rogers is Madly in Love with the Winter Soldier and Vice Versa' theory.

"Square deal, Barnes. And I'm Tony, unless you're trying to be a condescending jackass, in which case it's Anthony." Barnes nods.

"Noted, Tony." Tony claps his hands, and Barnes-well, he doesn't actually jump, but his face does the thing people's faces do when they jump, eyes wide and startled, jaw clenching.

"Easy there, Paranoid Soldier," says Tony. "Business talk time. You got that drive in a Hydra base?"

"Yeah, same one they were keeping the twins in." His flesh-and-blood hand clenches atop the island's granite surface, and hoo boy, that protective streak could rival Natasha's.

"I don't suppose you did recon beforehand?" Barnes raises an eyebrow in a textbook 'bitch-please-what-do-I-look-like' stare.

"Of course. 14 hours, full recon." Tony raises his hands, palms out.

"Hey, hey, I'm not a professional Hydra-stalker, okay, I don't know what procedure dictates. Did you happen to see them move anything out? From the files I went through, it sounds like they were keeping some kind of artifact there. I'm thinking it was Loki's scepter, but I want to be sure that's all we're dealing with here." Barnes nods.

"They moved something. Reinforced case, armored truck, and a fuckton of guards. About a meter, maybe one and a half?"

"Yeah, that sounds like the scepter. The files on the drive are a record of everything they had on it. They used it to give your kids their powers, and they were trying-I think, they're not the most coherent scientific files ever-they were trying to fuse robotics with magic, create something new and terrifying for us to deal with." Barnes sighs, presses his right hand to his forehead.

"Fucking Hydra."

"My sentiments exactly, no-scope." He gets a blank stare at that one. "What, no one's introduced you to Call of Duty? Actually, no, that's probably a good thing for all of our egos. Anyway, you should come by the Tower tomorrow, you can look through everything, see if any of it rings a bell from other bases or projects. Come to the party too, if you want. I've got disguises you can wear." Barnes laughs, dry and humorless.

"Thanks, but me at a party is pretty much guaranteed to end bloody. Not really m-much of a people person, anymore." Tony shrugs.

"Hey, nobody would blame you for stabbing a reporter. Seriously, though, there are a frankly disturbing number of roosts in the rafters of my building. Clint likes them, keeps bribing my girlfriend into putting in more. And the kids are invited too, if they're interested. It'll be fun, maybe a nice distraction from the shit they've been through."

"I'll tell them. And-I'll think about it." Tony grins.

"Perfect! Now, I've got an R&D meeting to be late to, so I'll be out of your hair, lovely as it is." He's thrown Barnes again, his cheeks turn just a bit pink, and he runs his flesh hand through his shaggy hair, self-conscious and way more adorable than a super-Soviet assassin has any right to be.

Tony takes off before Barnes can mount a comeback, because he likes to have the last word. He spends the drive back to Midtown thinking. That had been-less awful than imagined. Somehow, he'd been picturing Barnes as a dark-haired and shorter Steve, what with the whole 'best friends since childhood, just two good ol' Brooklyn boys' schtick. Instead, Barnes is-well, he's not much like Steve at all, really. He's twitchy and uncomfortable as a general setting, but he's also foul-mouthed and irreverent, and his sense of humor is dark and drier than the Mojave and fucking _hilarious_. So yeah. Tony likes him, and he kind of hopes he'll stick around.

At least long enough for Tony to get under the plates of that arm, because oh my God, just yes.

* * *

 **A/N:** Okay, guys, this took so many rewrites. So. Many. I have three scenes that I _love_ but couldn't fit in here. At least one of them, featuring breakfast at Steve's, will end up posted somewhere because it's just so damn cute. Reviews, pls. I have a need for validation and my muse is fueled entirely by feedback.

Take that, Civil War. I foiled Zemo's plan with a conversation and a Chevy engine. Seriously, why fight when you can instead begin a beautiful friendship that gives Captain America premature gray hairs?

Next time, on _All My (Enhanced) Children:_ Plot of the Ultron variety resumes, Natasha doesn't awkwardly flirt with Bruce at a party, and Wanda is a Telepath.


	5. I'm Not Calling You a Liar

**A/N:** Previously, on The Enhanced and the Reckless: Tony and Bucky launch the Bromance of the Century. Tony invites a trio of Hydra experiments to a party. Wanda is Telepathic. The Winter Soldier steals a big, nasty drive from a Hydra base in the Czech Republic

* * *

 **MAY, 2015. AVENGERS TOWER.**

Pietro loves Prospect Park. He's bouncing all over the place, and it's quite frankly a miracle he hasn't blown their cover in favor of funning around the big pond. Wanda likes it well enough, likes the gentle murmur of happy minds around her, likes the sunshine and being able to see the sky above her. Unfortunately, she's telepathic, so even though Steve just said he wanted to show them the park, she knows they're only here because Tony Stark wants to talk to Yasha about his parents. So, Wanda's enjoyment of the nature is kind of spoiled by worry. Not that she thinks he's really in danger, because Yasha's kind of terrifying and also, to use one of Pietro's favorite expressions, a 'complete and utter badass,' but she also knows it's a complicated situation with a lot of sharp edges and a lot of potential fallout.

She hasn't told Pietro. He's just having such a nice time, and she hates to ruin it with her accidental eavesdropping.

In the end, she needn't have worried, either. When she, Pietro, and Steve get back, Yasha is really anticlimactically reading a book on the couch. When Steve asks how his morning was, he tells them they're all invited to the Avengers celebration in Manhattan tomorrow night, but that it's completely up to them if they want to go. Except Steve, who has to go because he's a National Icon, apparently.

Since then, Wanda's been thinking about it. So, she's really not listening to her twin as he paces back and forth across the guest room they share, muttering about capitalist pigs and Tony Stark.

"I want to go." she says, coming to a decision. Pietro freezes mid emphatic hand-gesture, and zips across the room to stand in front of her.

"Wanda, that man-" She nods.

"I know. His weapons killed our parents, nearly killed us. But Steve and Sam are both good men. I know this. And they work with him, even like him. I-I want to meet him. I want to know what they see in him. For myself." Pietro opens his mouth to argue, so she cuts him off. "You don't have to come. I know you don't want to."

He scoffs. "If you think I'm going to let my little sister go to that place without me-"

"Pietro, twelve minutes doesn't make me your little sister." she says, rolling her eyes. He shrugs.

"Well," he says, laying a hand on top of her head. "You are little. And you are my sister. In my book, that makes you my little sister. And you're not going to this party alone."

"Okay, _mui bratr,_ okay." She sighs, fond, and shakes her head. You are insufferable." Pietro laughs, and pokes her in the arm.

"And you, _ma sestra,_ are a hypocrite." He crosses his arms and glares, mock-serious. "I'm not dressing up."

In the end, they all go, even Yasha, though the last time she checked, he was up in the ceiling, not actually socializing. Pietro, as promised, wears his new tracksuit. Wanda, because she's _civilized,_ wears the cute black dress and the soft red scarf she found at the little shop down the street. The party is pretty nice, so far. There aren't as many people as Steve warned them to expect, and the music is fun, all swing beats and smooth instrumentals. So far, they haven't had to do anything other than watch Sam beat Steve at pool.

And Natalia, the Russian lady with the cold mind, said Wanda's scarf was nice.

Still, she can't help looking up every now and then, up high to the rafters in the corner where she can feel Yasha's mind. Unlike Steve, she's not surprised he came. He wants to protect them, and protection, as he's said more than once in the few days she's known him, requires eyes on target. He also really, genuinely likes people, and hates that he can't be around very many of them at one time. Wanda feels sort of bad that she knows that, but she is a telepath, and sometimes she honestly can't help hearing. Besides, his head is so, so different from other people's, all ragged and sharp, and it jumps out at her.

After Steve loses at pool again, he excuses himself to walk around, check up on his friends throughout the party. Pietro is happy to take his pool cue, and from the way he's been watching the games like a hawk, Wanda thinks Sam's winning streak is over. Her brother's brain, after all, is as fast as his body.

She trails along in Steve's wake, letting him carve a path through guests, and she is, one by one, introduced to the Avengers. It's surreal. She and Pietro had been recruited by Hydra less than a year after the alien attack, but even then, Sokovia had already hated these people She remembers the first few protests, how good it felt to fight back against the arms dealer, the spies and liars and killers who pretend to be heroes. To have a target for her rage and grief. Wanda's rage is long since dead, she lost it somewhere in experiments and screaming blue light behind her eyes. Now, it is-interesting, to meet these people as one of them, as a freak of nature in her own right.

The archer, Hawkeye, his name is Clint, and he smiles at her like Pietro does, like a brother. Natasha, who is never far from him, he mind is as organized and pleasantly cool as it was the first time they met. She expects to find the monster she knows is lurking in Dr. Banner's mind, but all she feels is human, small and quiet, but so very sweet and glowy when he mentions a Dr. Ross in California. Then again, she can't feel the monster in Yasha's head, either. Maybe it is that way with all monsters. Thor, Thor's mind is incredible. It is like looking at a night sky full of stars, like seeing the whole universe laid out in front of her, and she could happily stare at it forever, but for his knowing smile. He doesn't comment on her intrusion, but she blushes at being caught all the same.

Then, there is Tony Stark. Even as she smiles and introduces herself, she is reading him, and she reads fear. His mind and motivations are awash with it. He knows his mistakes intimately, and he is terrified of repeating them, of destroying the family he's built himself out of his own wreckage. She could break him, she knows. It would be so easy, to show him his worst fears, and push him into making them reality. But this is no callous warlord, and there is very little of the Tony Stark of years past in this man.

Her smile lightens as she forgives him.

Besides, he and Thor get into an argument about which of their two girlfriends is more successful a few minutes later, and if she'd broken him, she wouldn't get the chance to laugh at him with Steve and his coworkers-who-aren't-avengers, Maria and Colonel Rhodes.

Before it's very late, Maria has shooed all the important people and special guests away, back to their fancy cars, and all that's left are Steve's friends, the people he trusts. She ends up leaning sleepily on Pietro's shoulder where they sit on a couch between Steve and Sam. The contentment radiating off of these people is like a warm blanket over Wanda's soul. They are their own little family, and she finds herself thinking, and mumbling to her brother, that she thinks she'd like to be a part of it. He snorts and shoves at her shoulder, but his mind is more peaceful than it has been since the moment she figured out the ragged mess of guilt and pain and grief she knew but didn't feel was her twin brother.

It happens between one breath and the next. There is a stab of alarm that doesn't come from her, chasing the sleep from her veins. Less than a second later, Yasha is standing in their midst, a gun pointed at the flying robots about to crash through the window.

Natasha registers a shadow, dropping from the ceiling, and she's already reaching under her skirt for her sidearm and spinning as the shadow resolves into dark hair, blue eyes colder than Russia in the winter, and, improbably, black skinny jeans and a hoodie. She's got the safety off just as the point drone smashes through the window, and has just enough time to wonder why the hell Jarvis hadn't warned them before it's barreling into their midst and she's lunging across an armchair to knock Bruce out of the way. Six shots ring out in quick succession, Yasha emptying a clip into the swarm, and then breaking glass and the crash of overturned furniture and Maria's voice, alarmed,

"Rhodey!"

Natasha lifts her head, shaking broken glass from her hair, and sees Clint go sliding across the floor for cover. She scrambles to her feet, wishing for pants, and fires, covering Bruce as he climbs over the bar. She hopes, desperately, that he doesn't turn green. Then, the floor erupts under her feet, dust and shattered concrete exploding around her, stinging her exposed skin. Something hard and unyielding wraps around her bare ankle and сукин сын, they're coming up through the floor now.

Sam wraps an arm around her waist, hauling her free, and Mjolnir smashes through the thing's arm before it can grab for her again. They sprint up the stairs to the balcony as Steve leaps and catches the back of one 'bot, throwing off its flight pattern for a moment before it slams him into a wall. He drops, lands hard on a bar stool and then the ground in another spray of shattered glass. The drone takes the opportunity to jet away, back through the broken window and out into the night. Across the way, Tony vaults the balcony railing and clings to another, brandishing a metal stirring stick like a screwdriver. Maximoff is a blur, drawing the drones' attention.

The things are vaguely humanoid but with wicked blades along their forearms, and blank plates in place of faces. Faint red light glows from their joints. Natasha finds that if you aim at the join between their heads and the rest of them, they drop, and she uses this knowledge to great effect, until she sees one of the things advancing on Wanda where she's crouched under the piano, fists clenched and breathing hard. It raises an arm, and the girl throws up her hands, twisting them, but nothing happens. Natasha snaps her gun up and Sam's already throwing himself toward them, but before she can fire, Yasha's appeared between the girl and the drone, catching its strike on his arm, and then Natasha has to lay down cover fire for Clint as he flings Steve's shield across the room. Steve catches it in midair, twists, and puts the shield's razor edge through a drone, pinning it neatly to the concrete wall. At around the same time, Tony's stirring stick finds its mark, sending both the 'bot and him into the stairs, and Thor sends Mjolnir smashing through three more. Yasha rips the last drone's head off in a smooth, brutal motion and like that, it's over.

Thor warily lowers Mjolnir and Tony shoves himself upright, groaning. Natasha hops the railing, slides down the wall and tumbles to her feet at ground level.

"What the hell was that?" gasps Sam. Tony says something similar, but Natasha's not listening, because Yasha hasn't moved, is still standing motionless among the remains of the drone. His forearm is sliced wide open and blood is rapidly soaking the sleeve of his hoodie but he's either ignoring it or, the more dangerous option, hasn't noticed. With that in mind, she walks toward him, but doesn't holster her weapon. When she gets within a few feet, his head snaps around and she gets a glimpse of pale, empty blue before he shuts his eyes and grinds out, voice shaking,

"Не трогайте меня." She nods and says, calm and steady,

"Ты в безопасности. Ты знаешь меня, Яков, меня зовут-"

"Natalia." he finishes, eyes opening again. His jaw clenches, hard, and his left hand goes to the cut, pressing the ragged edges shut. She relaxes and puts her gun away, because pain means Yasha's back. The Winter Soldier tends not to notice injuries until they actually affect his job performance; she's had sparring sessions with him that involved broken bones and zero reaction.

Thor takes off after the escaped drone. The rest of them grab first aid supplies and regroup downstairs, where there's more bad news.

Steve is trying really, really hard to focus on the problem. Normally, that's not hard, but at the moment, his mind keeps flashing to Nat and Bucky's little Russian exchange, and the way she'd very nearly had a gun pointed at him until he said her name. He can't ask either of them about it in front of everyone else, but they're very unlikely to be alone any time soon, if the way they're all arranged around the lab, licking wounds and looking at an empty countertop.

"It's gone. All that work, and it's just gone." Sam's fists are clenched, his voice tight and angry, but it's Clint who hisses, staring at the space where the scepter had been just a few hours ago,

"Goddammit! Tony, how did this happen?" Tony looks up from where he's frantically typing at the computer console, and shakes his head.

"I don't know, Jarvis should've- _shit_." He turns away from the console, face ashen. "I can't find Jarvis." Steve's blood runs cold. Apart from being the Tower's main line of defense against cyberattacks, Jarvis is also incredibly important to Tony, and he can't help but be compromised by this. And unlike Nat or Clint, he won't act accordingly, which is potentially a very big problem.

Bruce looks up briefly from Bucky's arm, which he's in the middle of sewing back together, and says, "This has to have been the scepter."

"What do you mean?" asks Steve. Tony makes a strangled little noise, and Steve's mind flashes through some truly terrifying possibilities. "Tony, what did you do?" he demands, and Tony jerks upright, power of speech restored.

"Nothing! We didn't do anything; I didn't even get the chance to look at the thing before the Invasion of Normandy showed up. I had Jarvis run some scans this afternoon, but that's it, I swear!" Beside him, Bucky chuckles. Steve rolls his eyes at the reference, but he relaxes. Tony might not be the best team player ever, but Steve would have been really worried if he'd kept experiments with an alien artifact secret from the rest of them.

"But," says Bruce, without looking back up from his work, "Jarvis' scans showed that the jewel in the scepter was a housing for something not unlike a computer. An-incredibly advanced one." Natasha sighs.

"An incredibly advanced computer that's been here for three days, hooked up to our network." she says. "And now the scepter's gone, along with all the information we had on it, the Sokovia base, and Strucker."

"N-no," says Bucky quietly. "Not all of it, anyway." Tony points at him, hand waggling.

"That's right." He looks at Steve. "He's great, we're keeping him." Then he's gone, jogging off in the direction of the elevator. Natasha jerks her chin at Bucky.

"The drive you stole?" He nods.

"Hydra's intel on the artifact." Steve scrubs his hand across his face, relieved.

"So we're not flying quite blind." he says. "Maybe we can figure out what the hell just happened, get a handle on what we're facing here."

The drive tells them-not a whole lot, actually. The vast majority of Hydra's files are focused on the experimentation that created Pietro and Wanda. In the interest of not traumatizing the twins further, they leave these unopened, for now. Natasha will probably go through it all later, as she is both the most paranoid and least squeamish person living at the Tower. However, there are a few files focused on testing done with the scepter itself. They conclude the same thing Jarvis had; that the scepter houses a massively powerful energy source which appears to function like a computer, or, well,

"Like a brain?" Tony reads off, and Clint jumps. Given it's the first thing anyone's said aloud in nearly an hour, it's fairly understandable. Bruce is up and across the lab in seconds, reading over Tony's shoulder.

"That's what this Doctor List thinks. Not a human brain, but a thinking, sentient structure." He puts a hand on Tony's shoulder. "That, combined with the robotics we saw in Sokovia-"

"Artificial intelligence," breathes Tony. "I thought that was the direction they were looking, from what I read a couple of days ago, but you don't think-" Bruce nods, and Steve sighs, tired of the quantum logic jumps.

"I'm sorry if my pre-nuclear age upbringing is getting in the way again, but I have no idea what you're talking about." he says. Tony laughs shakily and shakes his head.

"No worries, Cap, this is pretty uncharted territory even now. As far as I know, Jarvis is-or was-the closest thing in the world to artificial intelligence. And I didn't even mean to create him." Steve raises an eyebrow.

"You accidentally created a sentient computer program?" Tony shrugs.

"Yeah, meant to make a scheduling program to handle as much of my personal life as possible, and through a lot of messing around with features, I got Jarvis. I still don't know what it was I did that gave him a personality." He runs a hand through his hair and turns back to the file. "This-this isn't that. This is alien tech, and it's way more powerful than Jarvis could ever be." Before he can continue, a crack of thunder announces Thor's unsuccessful return.

"Nothing," he growls as he stalks back into the lab. "I lost it somewhere over the Atlantic." He levels a glare at Tony. "If you've been keeping things from us-" Tony's hands go up, palms out.

"Why does everyone think that?" he yelps. "I'm starting to get a little offended." But Thor's not listening anymore, he's staring intently at the digitized file hanging in the air behind Tony.

"What is that?" he asks, tone quite a bit milder than before.

"It's what Hydra thought of the scepter's gemstone." explains Bruce.

"That's an Infinity Stone." says Thor, and he says it like it's something they should all just know, so this time, Clint takes one for the team.

"Okay, I know I'm new to this whole magic and aliens thing, but is that something I should already know about? Because it kinda sounds like it's something I should already know about." Thor frowns.

"No, of course not, my apologies. Infinity Stones are-concentrations of energy. The tesseract was one, and evidently, so is the scepter. There are six of them in total, each with unique properties, and all meant to be lost to time." His frown gets deeper. "Four of them have now cropped up across the galaxy in the past three years. It is-troubling." Clint blinks.

"Troubling." he says. "Yeah, okay, that's a word." Pietro laughs, startled and short.

"I am sorry," say Thor, still frowning, "I should have mentioned them earlier. I often forget how isolated Midgard is from the happenings of the wider cosmos." Steve wonders why he ever bothers to think his life can't get any weirder. The universe appears to be taking it as a challenge. Infinity Stones. Jesus.

"Okay," he says, trying to sound like he's taking all of this in stride. "So what does that tell us about what attacked us? Something had to have hacked the Tower security, Tony."

"Okay, first of all, you know how it hurts me when you use the word 'hacked,' Captain 1990s. Second, I have a thought about that, depending on what our resident alien thinks. So, we know Hydra was knocking at the big 'AI' door. We pressed pause on their experiments when we hit Sokovia, but I think we might have accidentally helped them, too. Because of Jarvis."

"I don't follow." says Natasha. Tony waves a hand at her.

"Yeah, that's because I'm not done yet. As of tonight, this Infinity Whatsit has been connected to Jarvis for three days, and none of us have actually been watching what it does. We've all been understandably distracted and we made the mistake of thinking it wasn't active. My thought is that it created-well, _something_ , all on its own, maybe using Jarvis as a template." He sits back in his chair, looking grim.

Bruce groans. "And the something is what shut down your security and sent the drones to steal back the scepter." he says. "God, this is convoluted. The-whatever the stone spawned-it hijacked robots to steal the stone back from us before we figured it out and stopped it."

"I have a headache just thinking through that." says Clint, leaning against the balcony railing. "So, next question: what does it want?"

"Well," says Tony, and he sounds almost hesitant. Steve takes a deep, fortifying breath, and longs for the simplicity of World War II. A quick glance at Buck's expression says he's thinking something similar. "I have a thought about that, too." Tony taps a remote and a hologram of the earth appears, with a gently glowing net of red around it.

"Shit," breathes Bruce, and that's how Steve _knows_ they're in trouble. "Ultron?" Tony nods.

"Ultron."

* * *

 **A/N:** Again with the rewrites. So many, guys. I swear this isn't a scene by scene rehash of AoU. His plan is different, it just kinda starts the same way. Yakov, familiar form Yasha, is the closest Slavic languages get to the name James, which is why all the Slavic-speaking characters call Bucky Yasha. Wanda and Pietro say 'my brother', and 'my sister', respectively. Natasha's Russian bit translates to son of a bitch. Her conversation with the Winter Soldier is as such:

WS: Don't touch me.

BW: You're safe. You know me, Yakov, my name is-

WS: Natalia.

As you may have noticed, Bucky in a fight isn't necessarily Bucky. Reviews are found family tropes. Seriously guys, I have no reviews and I am Sad about it.


	6. Search and Destroy

**A/N:** Welcome back to General (Avengers) Hospital! Last time, drones attacked the Tower, Bucky had a Bad Moment, which Natasha interrupted, and the Avengers made some deductions.

* * *

 **MAY, 2015. AVENGERS TOWER, MANHATTAN.**

Bucky thinks he deserves some kind of award for how very, very calm he's been for the past two hours. He thinks this very absently, with the .05% of his head that's not arguing with itself over whether killing everyone in the building and then going to ground is the appropriate response to the situation, namely getting attacked and then being hemmed in, injured and vulnerable around multiple threats. Because that's what they all are, all of them, with the possible exception of Steve, and that only because Bucky's pretty sure he'd rather literally, actually die than kill him.

Right around the time he really needs to bow out and go stand on the roof until he can breathe again, the Avengers agree there's nothing to be done until morning. Agent-Commander-Miss? Hill goes to call the powers that be and Steve, in his delightful Team _LeaderSergeantMom_ voice, which absolutely _does not_ make that .05% of Bucky's brain go weak at the knees, suggests they get some shuteye on the personal floors. That all of the Avengers have here, like the world's most PTSD-riddled college dorm. .05% of Bucky's head wonders if Tony's in therapy. He needs to be in therapy.

It is, in the understatement of the decade, not a good night for shuteye.

Even if he could sleep all wired like this and in a new-and heavily surveilled-place, it's almost guaranteed to end in a really bad episode, the kind of flashback that makes reality bleed and tear, leaves him with no way to know what's real and what's memory. If that happens tonight, someone will get hurt. Never let it be said that Bucky doesn't know himself. His forearm itches and aches as it knits back together, and he focuses on the feeling, uses it to wrestle the bits of his head that weren't ready for a fight tonight and now aren't ready to let it go back into the dark corners where they live. Yeah, sleep, not a good idea.

Instead, he scrubs and/or sharpens all of his weapons 'til you could eat with them, and passes the hours with increasingly difficult stretching routines, all based on the USSR's Olympic gymnasts' routines. Much like the union itself, Hydra-in-the USSR had a weird obsession with sports, classical music, and the ballet, which is why Bucky knows this shit, but the routines are also really good for both focus and wearing out his stupid machine of a body. When the sun breaks over the skyline, he's upside down, balanced on his left forearm with his feet behind his head, his muscles are all aching and loose, and he feels less like he's going to stab anyone that touches him. He rolls slowly back down and to his feet as Steve comes in from his bedroom, and goes to get his shirt.

"You sleep at all?" Bucky freezes where he's bent over the back of the sofa, turns his head very slowly to look at Steve in disbelief. He sighs, rubs a hand across the back of his neck. "Okay, stupid question. Sorry. You, uh, you feeling better then?" Bucky shrugs, yanks the shirt over his head to hide any incriminating expressions.

"Arm's healing, should be fine by tomorrow." he mutters once he's got his head and arms through the right holes. Steve gives him a loaded look, one that says that wasn't what he meant and Bucky knows that, thank you very much, but he doesn't want to answer Steve's actual question, so he wakes the twins up and then goes to take a shower instead. They stick close to Bucky as Steve makes coffee and herds them downstairs, less of the fluffy early-morning teenager thing than days past. Pietro is back to his starving, feral dog body language, obviously shaken. Wanda's powers hadn't come to her when she'd needed them last night, and Bucky catches her flexing her hands, watching the light flicker along her fingers with a lost expression as they walk. He squeezes her shoulder, and makes a mental note to teach her how to defend herself without them as soon as they have time.

They end up in a common area a few floors down from Steve's. It's smaller than the top floor party deck, but also not full of shattered glass or drone parts. Wanda makes a beeline for a giant armchair, curls herself into it. Pietro sits next to her, because the thing really is massive. Bucky's still not comfortable enough to sit, but he leans up against a wide support pillar that's near enough to the furniture not to be weird. Tony's already there when they enter, and he's been busy. There's a stainless-steel coffee mug on the end table beside him, half full. His face is gray and drawn. If he slept last night, Bucky will eat the mug.

"So, I think the robots were sent by this guy." Tony says once the whole company's there, turning a tablet around to show them an old news article that features a smallish, but handsome guy with blond hair and a pissy expression.

"Bruno Horgan?" Barton snorts in between pulls from his own coffee mug, which, by the scent, has a shot of whiskey in it. "If I had a name that terrible, I might consider supervillainy, too." Bucky smirks.

"He used to be a pretty big player in the weapons game." explains Tony. "Lost all his contracts to me back in '96 after it came out he was cutting corners in production. Since then, he's turned to robotics. The tech we saw last night is definitely his style, fast and flashy, but ultimately pretty easy to take apart. And-" He swipes at the tablet screen and brings up a news site.

"Huh." says Steve, hands going to his hips. "I take it he didn't have the resources to build a campus in the Swiss Alps before now." Tony laughs without humor.

"Yeah, no. Guy's been slumming it in rural India since he got blacklisted from the arms business. But, if he just got paid for a job by, say, a sentient internet virus that has access to a lot of banks-" Steve crosses his arms, leaning in over Tony's shoulder. Bucky has to smile at it, despite the situation, because apparently, Steve still forgets he's so tall now. He's looming over Tony at the moment, but Bucky knows bone deep that he's just getting close, the better to hear with ears that hadn't always worked so well. He thinks Steve'd done that in the War, too, made a lot of officers and occasionally Jim really uncomfortable completely by accident.

"Right." says Steve. "So it was a job. Ultron paid Horgan to steal the scepter for it." Tony nods. Before he says anything else though, Hill marches back in, face grim and another tablet in hand.

"The scepter isn't the only thing that was stolen recently." And fuck him if that doesn't look like-

"Vibranium," Steve's eyes go to his shield where it's leaning against the coffee table. Hill nods.

"Wakanda is keeping it quiet, but Coulson picked up chatter when the container was moved into Mozambique last night. His best guess says it was taken by this guy." She swipes to a picture of a big white guy with an improbable number of tattoos and a pretty nice haircut, all shorn on the sides and longer on top. "Ulysses Klaue, he's a South African arms dealer with a lot of contacts and a license to trade in Wakanda. I'm sure I don't need to tell you what an organization like Hydra could do with that much vibranium."

"Well, that is a terrifying thought." says Banner. "We have to get on top of this. I say some of us go to Lyon and talk to Strucker. Find out what exactly he was doing with the scepter, what we're actually dealing with. Our heavy hitters need to go to Mozambique before Hydra either buys the vibranium off of Klaue or kills him."

"No rest for the weary, huh?" sighs Barton.

Natasha digs an elbow into his ribs, and nods at Banner "That's a good plan. You, me, and Clint can take the jet to Lyon. Shouldn't need more than that."

"I want to come, too." says Pietro suddenly from his place in the armchair. "To Lyon." Natasha's mouth twitches down, and Barton says,

"I don't think that's-" but Wanda interrupts him, hopping to her feet.

"No, it's a good idea." she says, earnest. "If we go with you, Strucker won't be able to play his word games with you. I can read him." Barton shakes his head.

"You're just kids, it's not right." he starts, but Pietro growls, low in the back of his throat.

"We _were_ kids. Strucker took that from us. He tortured us, experimented on us. He wanted us to be Hydra's weapons." He gets up too, stands beside Wanda. "I want him to know he failed." Wanda sets her jaw, and nods.

"We are going." And that settles the matter, at least as far as the twins are concerned.

It's not that he decides to go to Africa, really. It's more that Steve says he's going, and then Bucky's suddenly thinking about whether he'll be more helpful up high with the Barrett or down on the ground at Steve's side, and before he knows it, they're both in Brooklyn, grabbing their respective gear.

It makes sense, though. For obvious reasons, Bucky can't go to INTERPOL's headquarters with the twins, but they're going, and in a pinch, he'll trust Natasha to protect them. And Steve, by all accounts and all video evidence, has no concept of self-preservation. Without his usual spies to watch his back, someone damn well has to fill in.

Now, if only Steve will stop being a fucking martyr about it.

"Steve, of the two of us, which one is better at subtlety? Unless the definition's expanded to include _literally_ punching a Panzer, it ain't you, ace." he snaps eventually, because this is the third time Steve's informed him this is his fight and not Bucky's, and he's annoyed. Steve flushes, scowls, and replies,

"Because the trail of blown out Hydra bases all over Europe is so subtle." Bucky rolls his eyes.

"They don't see me coming, though. That's kinda the whole point of covert ops, Steve." When he opens his mouth to keep arguing, Bucky cuts him off. "I've been fighting your fights since we were fuckin' six. This is what I'm good at. Let me do it."

He's talking about wetwork, but Steve's eyes go all soft and warm, so he doesn't clarify.

Of course, he thinks as they're flying across the Atlantic, the downside of not actually making a conscious decision to do this is that he also hasn't thought it through. Fortunately, he's now had a few hours to freak the _fuck out_ over how he's about to let the Soldier out to play right in front of Steve. And not like last night, either; that had been unexpected, necessary, and also over really quickly.

When he has the time before an op, Bucky's got a routine. The Soldier comes to the surface bit by bit, to the backdrop of weapon assembly and either Biggie or Maiden, depending on the day. After the mission's over, Bucky comes back the same way, in increments. He's not sure what it looks like from the outside, other than clinically insane, but he imagines it's pretty obvious, especially to Steve, who knows him better than anyone alive.

But there's no help for it. The Soldier is what scares bad guys, and also what's kept poor James Buchanan alive and functioning- _sort of, shut up, brain_ -for the past seventy-odd years. Bucky owes his life, a thousand times over, to the gaping, nasty black hole in his psyche that calls itself, with a vicious and brutal sort of pride, the Winter Soldier.

But, fuck, would it be nice to just be a real person with a relatively stable mental landscape.

In the end, Sam bows out of both missions, electing to stay behind and go to his actual job at the VA, though he insists Steve call if they need him. Steve doesn't begrudge Sam that, knows how important his work is, but he misses his solid, ineffable presence at his back all the same. He also misses Sam's pre-mission jokes and perpetual good humor, especially given the team today.

Bucky is-quiet. Since they took off, he's been sitting in a corner of the Quinjet, forearms braced on his knees, staring at the floor between his boots. His hair is hanging in his eyes, but he doesn't seem to notice. This early in the flight, none of them are suited up; Thor is still in jeans and a hoodie. Without Clint and Sam's preferred method of expressing pre-mission jitters, the atmosphere is oppressively silent, despite Tony's phone playing something gritty and fast at a low volume over the speakers.

Somewhere near the West African coast, Bucky moves, pulling out his iPhone (yes, seriously) and putting in a pair of earbuds. It's then that Steve realizes he's never seen Bucky get ready for an op in this century. During the War, he'd had a routine that he kept to religiously. That had been Buck's thing, on op mornings he had one cup of shit coffee, smoked a cigarette, Camels, if he'd managed to fleece them off another of the Howlies or another unit, Chesterfields if he hadn't, methodically unpacked and repacked his ruck, and then spent as much time as available checking his rifle, disassembling and reassembling it until he was happy with the way all the parts slid together. Steve can still see it all in his mind's eye, Bucky settled on a stump or a rock out in the backwoods of Europe with his gun in his lap, eyes intense, lips pursed in concentration, a fixed point of calm in the midst of the chaos that so often ruled their camps. Hell, Steve's drawn Buck like that from memory, it was such a common scene.

Steve can't help but wonder if he has a routine now, too. Maybe not, or at least not one so rigid, anyway. He can't imagine Hydra would have wanted their asset to have a constant like that. Then again, Buck's had plenty of time to figure one out in the past year.

Sure enough, as Steve pulls on his own uniform, watching surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye, Bucky gets ready with ordered, practiced motions. He's already wearing his black combat fatigues, and changes boots first, switching out his well-worn, soft ones for a heavy, rubber-soled pair with flat laces. Next is a tac vest, not the same one he'd worn in DC, Steve notes; it's a lot less busy, and it's more Kevlar than leather. He buckles on a leather back holster, matching thigh holsters-Steve tries very hard not to stare, but for Christ's sake, it's like Bucky's thighs were _made_ for them-and a belt that has six grenades that Steve can see clipped on, as well as a pair of long combat knives buckled to it. After that, his matched SIGs go into the thigh holsters, along with a few throwing knives on each. A Skorpion machine pistol goes in the back holster. After the guns are all strapped in, he looks back up at Steve, shaking hair out of his face, and pulls out one earbud. Steve's ears pick out tinny, bass heavy rhythm and what's maybe rapping over the top.

"Should I bring the Barrett?" Bucky asks, rough voice all flat, mild interest. Steve, who is in the middle of tugging his own boots on, looks up, surprised, and meets Bucky's eyes. They're cold, cold, cold and _sharp,_ not the blank mask from the bridge, and absolutely not the guarded but still unmistakably present emotion he's gotten used to in the past couple of days. The closest frame of reference Steve has for that expression is Bucky in the millisecond before he takes a shot, all intense, frightening focus.

It's like calling a panther a kitten. Steve blinks twice in rapid succession, and forces his gaze back to his boots, because looking at Bucky is suddenly really uncomfortable.

"Uh," he says intelligently, "Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I don't think Klaue's likely to come quietly, and a sniper's probably not a bad idea." Buck nods once, and puts the earbud back in, then drops his head back against the fuselage and closes his eyes. Steve's kind of worried, would be more worried, but Bucky is pretty relaxed and breathing normally, so he lets it go, though that expression sticks in his head as he buckles his gloves and does up the chinstrap on his helmet.

As they start their descent, Thor's calls his armor to himself. It's as impressive as always, and the clinking sound of his scale armor assembling itself has Bucky leaning around the corner, eyes still cold, and brighter than normal against all the black he's wearing. There's an edge of curiosity to his face, albeit a pretty clinical curiosity that reminds Steve of Natasha's 'I-am-cataloguing-your-weaknesses-so-I-can-use-them-against-you-later' face. While Tony brings the jet down, Steve stands up and rolls his shoulders, settling himself. Buck stows his phone and the headphones, and gets up as well, rolling to his feet with nearly inhuman grace and economy of motion.

"Right," says Steve, hauling his gaze and his thoughts away from his best friend (or, maybe not his best friend, so much right now). "I don't want to go in hot on this one; there's a civilian population less than a klick away." Thor nods, and Tony says, without looking back,

"So, you and me on rights-reading duty, Fabio on standby for when everything inevitably goes to hell, and-I heard something about a Barrett, Lyudmila?" A small, nasty smile appears on Buck's face, and he pats the Barrett's case where it's leaning against the bench beside him.

"Mmmhm. Nice reference." His grin gets wider, and not remotely nicer. "I think I've got her beat though, in terms of Nazis put out of our misery." Steve clears his throat.

"You can find a perch?" Bucky nods, smile gone and all cold professionalism again.

"Sure. Bound to be a nice dark corner in there somewhere." Steve inclines his head, and then the jet's down with barely a jolt. Once it's powered down, Tony gears up, the pieces of his suit assembling themselves on him in a series of little metallic whirrs and clanks.

"Comms set?" asks Steve as the faceplate snaps into place and its eye slits light up.

"Yup." comes Tony's voice in twofold, distorted by the mask and clear through Steve's earpiece. "Let's go arrest an arms dealer."

 **MAY, 2015. LYON, FRANCE.**

Pietro is having a hard time staying still. He feels wired, full of energy with no outlet and he wants to run, run until exhaustion chases the adrenaline of the past day out of his head. He can't do that here, though. The INTERPOL building is enormous, a massive cube of glass and cement, and full of agents. So instead of running like he wants to, Pietro taps his fingers against his thigh and keeps an eye on Wanda. She's still freaked out about her powers, he can tell, and if he's honest, it scares him too, that they can just desert her when she needs them. The one good thing about Hydra's experiments had been Wanda's powers, that she can, in theory, protect herself from anything she needs to. In theory. Because in reality, it seems they're far from infallible.

Agent Barton, who insists they call him Clint, decides to stay with the jet, muttering something about suits making him twitchy. A flash of Natalia's i.d. gets them through security with no questions asked, though Pietro notices all the officers eying Dr. Banner out of the corners of their eyes. Banner notices, too, shoulders hunching in as he tries to put them at ease.

Wanda likes him, and Pietro understands why. They both try their hardest to be small and harmless, even though they are in fact very far from it. Pietro doesn't do that. Like Natalia, he owns his lethality. He's gone through a lot of horrible shit, shit he never wanted, but he'll take these powers Hydra shoved into him and he'll take them happily. He doesn't care what people think about it, aside from not particularly wanting to get arrested for zipping around INTERPOL's headquarters.

They are escorted down to the cell blocks, to Strucker's tiny cement room.

"Evening," says Natalia. "How's the room service?" Strucker, whose cheek, Pietro is viciously pleased to note, is badly bruised, snorts.

"What do you want, Widow?" he growls. She smiles, ice cold.

"My friend has some questions for you, Wolfgang." she says smoothly, and she steps back to let Banner take her place.

"Ah, the monster himself." says Strucker, leaning forward. Banner shrugs, unfazed by the cheap shot.

"Luckily for you, it's just 'Doctor' tonight." he says. "We've seen your notes, the experiments you were doing with the scepter." Stucker smiles, gaze shifting to Wanda where she stands half behind Pietro.

"Ah, up close, too, hm? Are they not magnificent, my creations?" Pietro snarls and lunges forward, intending to-well, he doesn't know what. A warm, tingling sensation crawls up his arm before he gets far though, pulling him gently, but inexorably back. He looks down to find red tendrils of light spiraling up to his elbow, and Wanda's eyes, brown and full of reproach. He stills, reminds himself why they're here.

"We're not here about Wanda and Pietro," says Banner, nonchalant as if they were discussing the weather. "They just wanted to let you know they're safe and well, in case you were worried about them." Wanda tilts her head to the side, and Pietro grins, sketches off a rakish wave. It does feel good, like closure, to see Strucker there in the cell. "I'm interested in the robotics and bio-robotics you were working on." Strucker's eyes go wide.

"How do you-those records were deleted, I made sure of it." Wanda laughs, high and pretty.

"You think you know everything there is to know, don't you?" she asks, voice soft and mocking. "Everything in your control, no variables." Strucker's face smooths back out into a pleasant mask.

"Ah." he says. "The asset stole experiments _and_ intel from my lab then. You must forgive my lapse, Doctor, I simply didn't think our mad dog was capable of such independent thinking." Pietro doesn't rise to that, though he wants to. Behind him, Wanda's fist clenches. She's protective of Yasha.

"I'm interested in how far you got with your ideas regarding artificial intelligence, Strucker." says Banner, still utterly calm.

"That is a fascinating question, Doctor, with an equally fascinating answer. Unfortunately, I see no benefit in cooperating with you." Natalia smiles at that.

"You're not looking very closely, then." she says. "INTERPOL's pretty cushy, compared to Siberia. I'm sure the Kremlin would be happy to prosecute you, seeing as your organization's been linked to multiple attacks on Russian soil since the collapse of SHIELD." Strucker narrows his eyes.

"You're bluffing. There's no way INTERPOL will turn my case over." Banner laughs.

"Really? Money talks, Mr. Strucker, usually louder than anything else, and in case you've forgotten, the Avengers are pretty well funded. Is that a chance you're willing to take? Either way, you're never going to breathe free air again, so what's the point in holding information back?"

"The lack of a cyanide tooth tells me you're not quite as loyal to Hydra as some of your coworkers." says Natalia. "Cooperating is the smart choice, and you're a smart man." Strucker glares at her for a long moment, and Pietro thinks he'll refuse, that Natalia's wrong and he cares more about Hydra than himself, but finally, he speaks.

"My work was focused on my subjects." he says, leveling that proprietary look at Wanda that makes Pietro's blood boil. "But there is another scientist, more interested in the scepter itself. Him, you missed in Sokovia. He thought Hydra's future lay in more, ah, mystical routes. Magic, science, whatever you call it. In the modern age, that means fusing Schmidt's 'magic' with robotics and the like." He snorts. "As I said, it was not my work. If he made any breakthroughs, he kept them to himself."

"Name." says Natasha.

"He has no name." At her disbelieving look, Strucker shrugs. "He hasn't. He is a solitary man; I didn't even know he existed until after the DC fiasco. He appropriated Dr. List for his experiments with the scepter a few months after SHIELD's collapse, and returned him in March of this year. Ask dear Wanda, I do not lie."

"He doesn't." says Wanda softly. "That is all he knows." She slips between Pietro and Banner, so that she can lean in close to the bars. "You wanted us to be your weapons." she whispers, and a moment later, red twists around Strucker's throat. His eyes bulge, pupils blown wide in fear. "Are you happy with your good work?" Wanda's head tilts to the side, her hands clawed in empty air as she holds him. He chokes something, maybe a plea, maybe a curse; Pietro can't tell, and a moment later, Wanda drops her hands. "We are _not_ yours." she hisses. "Never again." Stucker collapses to the floor of his cell, gasping for air, and Wanda turns away. Pietro goes to take her hand, but as he reaches for her, the lights in the cell block go out, plunging everything into darkness.

"Now, now, Miss Maximoff," comes a deep voice that belongs to none of them. "Don't start something if you're not going to follow through, that's just poor advertising." Pietro spins, searching in the dark, and sees a flash of bloody light somewhere to his right. A flare comes to life in Natalia's hand a moment later, painting the corridor in red shades and illuminating a hulking shadow in their midst. It turns, revealing a face with glowing, pupil-less eyes.

"Ultron?" asks Banner. Natalia has a gun in her free hand now, leveled at the shadow's head. It grins, its mouth a darker slash in its face.

"If that's what you want to call me, sure. I think I like it." Then it moves, seems to pass through the bars and Wanda cries out, but before Pietro can get more than a few steps forward, it grabs Strucker by the back of his head and slams his temple into the solid metal of the bedframe with a wet squelching sound. The scent of blood and worse washes over them as Strucker's limbs twitch spasmodically in some horrific parody of a dance. Pietro's stomach turns over.

Natalia fires, the gunshot echoing off the walls, and the bullet sparks as it skids off of the thing's body. It laughs, and Pietro will hear the sound in his nightmares.

"Please, Natasha, save your bullets." Then it's right in front of them, and Pietro saw its movement back through the bars but it's fast, too fast for anyone without his hyper-detailed eyesight to track. It leans in close with sinuous, silent motion, and says softly, "Your friends in Mozambique will need them."

Natalia hisses something filthy in Russian, snaps, "What did you do?" The thing- _Ultron_ -chuckles.

"Well, you see, I didn't realize you'd be here. Figured you'd go to Africa with your Captain. So, the trap I laid for him might be a little overkill, and I'm left here with no plan for you four." Its hellish eyes narrow to slits. Pietro tenses, ready to grab Wanda and run. "It's okay though," says Ultron. "I can improvise." It opens its hand, Wanda gasps, Pietro moves to be between her and the shadow, sees a flash of blinding crimson light and then the world goes dark and the last thing Pietro hears before he hits the ground is his sister's scream.

Night has long since fallen over INTERPOL headquarters, and Clint is kind of wishing he'd gone to Africa with Steve and Tony, nasty arms dealer notwithstanding. It's not like Nat needs him here; this kind of talky work is her forte, not his. But hey, Nat also has her stubborn refusal to learn how to fly an aircraft, so he's happy to be her pilot. It's just also really boring while she's busy doing her spy thing and he's outside because he's still working through the whole SHIELD/Hydra deal and part of that is every time he sees cheap agency suits, he feels an irrational need to kill something, namely the handlers and suits he'd worked with for years that turned out to be fucking _Nazis._ To say DC had ripped a rug out from under Clint's feet is a massive understatement. The week between the Insight carriers going down and Natasha finding him in Kirkuk has a special place in Clint's head labeled 'No. Just fucking No, okay?' just for it. The next few months were also terrible, but terrible in a nice way, because Nat was there and giving him a constant, just like he was for her. That first week? Just terrible, or whatever word comes after terrible on the FUBAR scale.

So, he's out here, keeping the jet engines going so they can leave as soon as Nat and Bruce are done squeezing Strucker. He should have brought a book or something, though.

As it turns out, though, he doesn't end up needing a book, because less than five seconds after he wishes he had one, a fairly large explosion goes off in the building, blowing out a section of windows.

"Fuck!" yelps Clint, powering down the engines and grabbing for his bow and quiver at the same time. He sprints for the lobby, wherein security guys are milling around in a panic. They don't notice Clint vaulting the turnstiles. He skids along the hallways, headed down toward the cell blocks because that's where his friends will be. After scrambling down like, a million flights of stairs, he finds himself in the underbelly of the building, and he slows down, listening for combat, trying not to panic when he doesn't hear it. He can hear his own footsteps fine, echoing off the walls, so it's not an ear thing, there's just-nothing to hear.

Because the cells are all empty, locks disengaged. Fuck. _Fuck,_ this is bad. The green emergency lights are all flashing down here, but there's a red glow coming from one of the cell blocks, too, like the light from a flare. He heads toward it, arrow knocked and ready. There are bodies down here too, INTERPOL agents mostly, though he spots a couple of prison jumpsuits as well. Clint presses himself to the wall just outside the hallway he wants, and then spins into the entrance, bow drawn. There is a flare, laying on the ground on its side and burning happily away, its bloody light playing off the figures sprawled out across the floor.

 _Shit._ He lowers the bow and runs.

He crouches next to Natasha, searching frantically for her wrist in the chaotic green-and-red light show flashing around him. Finally finds it, and her pulse, strong under his fingers, and he breathes again. He checks over Pietro and the INTERPOL agent, also alive but out cold, and notes the very dead body in Strucker's cell. Then, he realizes, ice creeping through his veins, that there's a ragged hole in the ceiling and there aren't enough people in the corridor. Wanda and Bruce are missing.

Then, he hears the roar.

 _Shit._

* * *

 **A/N:** So yeah, happy cliffhanger. Had to happen sometime, right? This is officially the longest chapter I've ever written of anything ever.

Russia's obsession with sports, classical music, ballet, and literature is both well documented and ongoing. I figure that Hydra/the Red Room would want its operatives to be well versed in at least one. Thus, we have ballet dancer!Natasha and gymnast!Bucky. One of them may or may not have all of Pushkin's poetry memorized. They'll never tell. If you didn't get Tony's latest nickname for Bucky, go look up Lyudmila Pavlichenko right now because she's quite possibly the most badass person to ever exist.

Next time, on General (Avengers) Hospital: Shit is both very real and very Bad, for all involved. Except maybe Ultron.

As always, your reviews give me life. Or, in this case, review. Thanks so much though, nonnie! You made me smile!


	7. Tomorrow Will be Kinder

**A/N:** Previously, on The Bold and the Beautiful(ly Superpowered): Half the team goes to France and runs into Ultron, the other half goes to Mozambique in an attempt to arrest an arms dealer and recover some stolen vibranium.

Warning, this is literally all whump. No one's having a good time today. Disclaimer: I am well aware that none of the medical shit is practical or applicable in the real world, this is Marvel, there is no canon for any of it, so I had to improvise, and the internet is beyond unhelpful, since none of them are going to a hospital anytime soon.

* * *

 **MAY, 2015. ABANDONED SHIPYARD NEAR MAPUTO, MOZAMBIQUE.**

 _Well,_ thinks Tony, _this is going spectacularly badly._

As it turns out, their arrest-and-recovery mission is more like a desperate fight against an honest-to-God army of mercenaries and drones. And a couple of would-be supervillains too, because why not, right?

Tony grits his teeth, twisting and rolling through the air to avoid Horgan's plasma cannon. Plasma cannon, honestly. What is his life. Jesus, Bruce should have come, this is a textbook Code Green. They're fighting in the belly of a salvage yard cargo ship, it's not like anyone's going to care about property damage, and the Hulk's actually bulletproof. And plasma cannon-proof, which Thor is not.

"So, this is going less well than imagined." he says over coms. Steve's voice, when it comes, is out of breath.

"Yeah, can't say I was expecting the avenging inventor or-whatever this is." he says, meaning the green-and-black human tornado ripping back and forth across the ship, taking out mercenaries and drones alike in its quest to catch Thor. "Have any clues on how that cannon works yet?" Tony does not, because he's too busy trying not to have holes blown through him. Bruno is really, really pissed about the whole blacklisted-from-military-contracts thing.

"No." he growls. "Barnes, now would be a nice time for a headshot." There's a snort over the line.

"Yeah, it would. I'll let you know when I'm not drowning in mercenary." Shit, yeah, now Tony can see him up on the catwalk, engaged with several of the literal scores of gunmen that were lying in wait for them when they came in.

The plan had fallen apart immediately after Thor had cut the ship's internal power. As soon as the lights went down, a veritable army of mercenaries and way too many little red lights appeared, each signifying one of the drones they'd fought at the Tower. And yeah, they're not exactly powerful, but there are a lot of them, and their programming is just barely holding together. At the moment, they're all zooming around the place like giant demonic bees, slashing at any and all moving targets they find. Including the mercenaries, which sounds like it would be helpful, but is actually just chaotic. They're making visibility a nightmare. Tony's night vision keeps getting flared out by flying sparks and explosions. And the beams from the plasma cannon that Bruno Horgan is intent upon killing him with.

As he tucks himself into a ball to avoid Horgan's next shot, he spots Steve in a dark corner, grappling with the tornado, which is now occasionally human-shaped. And armed with a couple of knives. Because, again, why not? He dives toward them, hand out to blast the bastard, but before he can shoot, a drone slams into him and knocks him wildly off course. Unable to correct in time, he slams into the ship's hull and hits the floor, hard.

"Damage?" he spits, rolling up on one knee to fire at the mercenaries converging on him. There's no answer- _don't think about Jarvis, you're in the middle of a fight_ -but his HUD flashes a report.

Damage to suit is minimal. Well, hey, could be worse. Tony gets his feet back under him so he can go help Steve. As he does so, the cannon goes off again with a PHAM, and another white-hot blast of energy shoots toward him. Tony blasts forward, and manages to avoid catching the energy bolt to his center of mass, but it skates along his outflung right arm. The armor hisses and smokes, and the acrid smell of melted metal chokes him, throwing him right back to the NORCO and Killian. The suit's emergency systems are already disengaging the gauntlet and forearm piece, even as it melts and sloughs away from his arm, leaving blisters and reddened skin in its wake. Tony swears, breathless with pain and just a little panic. His suits aren't supposed to fucking _melt,_ not since fucking Extremis, and he has so many upgrades to make, this is _not_ happening again.

And dammit, Steve's still in trouble, Tony doesn't have time for this. Flight's not the most stable thing ever with only three repulsors, but he's had enough practice to compensate for it. He makes his unsteady way over the battle, dives, and rams the knife-guy, knocking him away from Steve and into a solid shipping container. He skids to a halt, and offers Steve a hand. He takes it, grimacing as Tony hauls him upright. He's bleeding freely from several deep cuts, and looks generally beat to hell.

They are so fucked. So very, very fucked.

"So, this is-awful." says Tony. Steve sighs.

"Guy can spin the air around him fast enough to repel my hits. I couldn't land anything on him." he says, frustrated.

"Captain, are you alright?" comes Thor's voice across the com channel, overlaying the sound of Mjolnir whipping through the air.

"Yeah, I'm okay," says Steve. "We need to wrap this up, now."

"Agreed." Barnes' voice is a low growl. "Gonna have to put the enhanced down for that, though."

"Okay." says Tony, sweeping his gaze over the chaos masquerading as a fight around them. "Cap, If Thor and I can distract our super-powered friends, can you keep enough of the regular people away from Barnes long enough for him to drop them? Preferably nonlethally, but at this point, I don't know if that's going to happen." Steve nods.

"Yeah, I can do that. I need the time to get up there without the wind guy catching me up, though."

"That's you, big guy." says Tony.

"Of course. I shall engage him momentarily." With a click, the channel cuts back out, leaving a cacophony of gunshots, metallic whirring, angry screaming about past wrongs, and general screaming, all echoing off the steel hull of the junker. Tony's ears have been ringing for ages, he can't even imagine how the supersoldiers and their supersensitive hearing are doing.

"Okay," says Tony, firing up his three remaining repulsors, "let's go draw some fire."

They move, Thor smashing his way through drones and jovially challenging wind-and-knife guy to a  
'proper match,' Tony spiraling through the air, aiming for Horgan, yelling "Come and get me, asshole!", and Steve ducking in and out of the melee of drones and mercenaries, headed more or less for the bloodbath on the catwalk.

And it is a bloodbath, too, Tony notes as he takes cover briefly behind a support strut. There are still seven or eight mercenaries up there, down from the close to twenty that had started converging on their sniper's position. Tony's seen the footage from DC, of course, but there's a difference between shaky cell phone videos of a one on one fight between supersoldiers and the straight up carnage up there right now. Sometimes, you just kinda forget how strong and fast Steve and Barnes are, compared to normal people. Barnes is flagging now, though, strength and speed aside, he's only one guy, and the mercs are all really well-armed. Tony doesn't dare get close enough to help, not with Bruno dogging his flight path with plasma bursts every few seconds. He does hope Steve makes it up there sooner rather than later, though. He wasn't kidding about wanting the kid to stick around.

Another streak of light is screaming towards him now, shot from somewhere above him and to the right, and Tony's had enough of this shit, thanks. He flings himself out from behind the strut and rockets, full repulsor burn, straight at Horgan. He makes it before the cannon's recharged, and slams his armored knee into Horgan's chest, knocking him flat. He's wearing some kind of body armor too, though, and he gets right back up, frothing mad.

"You ruined my life, you arrogant bastard!" he yells. Tony sighs, and aims a concussive blast of air at him, knocking him off-balance.

"Look, buddy, I didn't force you to cut corners on your work." He throws a punch, trying to keep the intact parts of his armor between the cannon and his bare, burned arm. Horgan leans out of the way, but just barely, and Tony's next hit connects with his stomach, hard. "And besides, I've been out of the weapons game for years; your revenge kick is a little late." Horgan reels back, coughing. The cannon glows as it cycles up. Shit. Tony's brain flicks through possibilities, and then he spots the piece of twisted, torn metal on the grating a few feet away. He scoops it up and, as the cannon whines, ready to fire, he jams it into the muzzle.

The resulting explosion blows Tony back off the platform. He crashes through a couple of shipping grates and hits the ground, hard.

"Ow." he groans, letting his head fall back against the floor.

"Thor, I can get a shot." says Barnes in his ear. Tony's never heard anything so beautiful. "Get out of the way." By the sound, Thor sends Mjolnir off into a cluster of drones. What with the noise of the fight echoing off of cavernous steel, Tony can't hear the shot go off, but he does hear a shriek of pain, hopefully from wind guy. A goon goes flying across Tony's field of vision, and he sits up with another groan, to survey the scene.

Green whirlwind guy is on the ground, clutching at his blown-out kneecap. Nice, Barnes. There's no sign of Horgan, other than a tangle of shorn, twisted metal where he'd been standing when the cannon blast rebounded. The drones are still milling around in a very pointy cloud, and they're gonna have to deal with that, but a decent number of the remaining mercenaries seem to be reconsidering their positions. Not all of them, of course, because that would be too easy, but he can see some slinking off, evidently deciding fighting the Avengers isn't worth it after all.

Fight's still not over though, not for another half-hour, and dear God, the half-dozen mercenaries and one enhanced they actually manage to arrest are not nearly worth it. Tony's forearm is blistered and bright red where the armor melted against his bare skin, and between the wall and the explosion, he's got bruises all over.

And that's just him.

Thor is keeping an eye on wind-guy, a quick data search of whom reveals a typical scumbag. David Cannon is his name, a mutant rather than a science experiment, started off with petty crime and worked his way up to amateur supervillainy from there. INTERPOL will be happy to take him off their hands, though, along with whichever of the mercenaries aren't from Mozambique. When he calls Agent Seif to report their location, though, there's no answer. That's odd, because Agent Fatima Seif's job is to liaise with the Avengers and not-so-former SHIELD agents to make arrests and take jurisdiction for INTERPOL on their ops. For her not to answer Tony's calls is worrying, though not necessarily cause for panic. He'll just call HQ in Lyon and get a line through to wherever Fatima is.

Lyon doesn't pick up either. That's when Tony starts panicking.

"Scan news reports, keyword: INTERPOL. I wanna know what's going on." Images flash through his HUD, freezing on a really bad one: the big building in Lyon that houses INTERPOL has a giant hole blown in it, still smoking. Next, there's a video clip, and in that, Tony can see-oh. Oh, no.

The Hulk is clearly mad as hell, and the INTERPOL agents with guns are the opposite of helping. The clip is live, so Tony gets to watch in real time as the Other Guy rips into an armored truck, reducing it to flaming scrap in less than 30 seconds, roaring all the way.

Fuck. They need to be in Lyon, like, hours ago. Natasha and Clint's skills aren't meant for taking down an angry Hulk, and where the hell are they and the kids, anyway? He's going to really, desperately hope they're needed somewhere inside the building, because the alternative is way too awful to think about.

Alright. He'll call Fury, then.

"I don't suppose you've noticed the big, green problem in France?" says Nick upon picking up. If this was a less tense time, Tony would snark back, but never let it be said he doesn't take his job seriously.

"Yes. Working on getting there, but we've got some gunmen and an E-I here that I'm not comfortable leaving unsupervised."

"Mozambique?" says Fury. "I can have a team there in 30. Get to Lyon and get a handle on this. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how bad this looks for us." Tony snorts. Whole world still thinks Fury is dead, but yeah, us.

"What's going on, Stark?" asks Steve as Tony hangs up on Fury. Tony shuts his eyes for a moment, then tells him. Steve blinks twice, and then says something in a language that is decidedly not English, and sounds kind of like he's trying to speak around a mouthful of marbles. Thor looks at him with interest.

"I have not heard that tongue in many years." he says. "I am not sure it counts less as blasphemy if you don't do it in English. But, I am no expert in Midgardian religion." Steve blushes and says,

"So we need to go." Tony nods.

"Fury's got a team on the way, they'll be here in less than an hour. But, yeah, we need to go. Thor, you should go on ahead, you'll get there faster than we can, and time is not on our side here." He nods, spins Mjolnir, and takes off with a low rumble of thunder, leaving them to cuff the mercs together and head to the jet.

Bucky fucking _hates_ blunt force trauma.

Gunshots are no fun either, but his body knows how to deal with them, is really good at dealing with them. Same with lacerations and poisons. No fun, but his body just deals with it and goes on. Internal injuries are different, and at the moment, Bucky's just glad he managed to sit down before hauling his sense of exhaustion and pain back from the little locked room in his head they go to during a fight. Fuck that mercenary with the steel-toed boots very much, he's pretty sure he's got broken ribs. He's grateful for the heavy tac vest, as it's the only reason he made it onto the jet upright; the structural integrity of his actual bones is pretty suspect at the moment.

It's not the most FUBAR mission he remembers, that dubious honor belongs to Vietnam in '68, but it's close. Really, really inadequate intel, a trap with enough teeth for all the Avengers, let alone three of them and an extra sniper. They've taken a hit, all walking wounded, except possibly Thor.

He can't suppress a grimace as Tony adjusts the jet's angle, knocking him a couple of inches back into the fuselage. Steve catches it and looks over. He looks generally like shit, there are shallow cuts along his forearms and on across his cheek. They're pink around the edges, already healing. His hands are beat to hell, though, all red and wind-burnt, cracked and bloody at the joints. Missing adrenaline, his blue eyes are dull and tired.

"Hey, you okay?" he asks, eyes going brighter with concern. Bucky doesn't have the breath for talking, really, but Steve'll just worry more if he doesn't answer.

"Think there's a perfect imprint of some asshole's boot on my side." And on the other side, at least one, but he thinks more like three, broken bones. He's gonna have to get out of the tac vest to check, though, and that'll be a fuckin' great time. They actually don't hurt so much-yet, they will later-it's just the general feeling of things that are supposed to be solid and supportive being-not. At all.

The buckles on the vest are obnoxious to undo with one hand, but he needs to not move his right side too much, because as shitty as broken ribs are, punctured lungs are worse. As they reach cruising altitude and Tony puts the jet on autopilot so he can come sit on the opposite bench and take care of his own hurts, Bucky gets the last of the fastenings undone, and through a lot of shrugging of his left shoulder, works his vest half off. A little poking at his side reveals, yes, three breaks and-ugh, _fuck that steel-toed sonofabitch,_ the goddamn metal one's come out of place.

"Anything broken?" asks Steve, still watching him. Bucky gives a shallow sigh.

"Yeah, 8, 9, and 10 on the right. They're all still where they're supposed to be, I think. You got anything I can use to strap 'em up before we get to Lyon?" Steve nods, hops up, and goes to a compartment towards the front. Across the way, Tony's dabbing at his burned forearm and hand with antiseptic.

"What did that?" he asks. They're bad burns, all blistered and shiny, and he's honestly kind of curious as to what could get through the Iron Man armor. Tony growls.

"Stupid asshole with the cannon. Horgan. He was aiming for my spine, though, so I'll count it a win." He gestures at Bucky's torso with the antiseptic wipe in his good hand, which, Bucky notices kind of abstractly, is shaking. "What did that?"

"Lucky bastard with steel-toed boots. The problem is the metal one, though." Tony raises an eyebrow.

"You have a metal rib?" Bucky nods, and because Tony looks like he could use a distraction, decides to elaborate.

"Mm. One on the right, got so fucked at some point they just gave up on putting it back together and replaced it with vibranium." Tony's face goes a little green around the edges, but his hand's gone still. "Four on the left, to compensate for the arm. They're adamantium, though. Stronger, and a little easier to get hold of." He shifts, and shit, _feels_ the damn thing move under his skin and come to rest right where he didn't want it to. His next breath is shallow, because there's a piece of fucking vibranium pressing on his lung. Forget not wanting to breathe in all the way, now he can't.

Yeah, today sucks. And hell, it's not over yet, either.

"Hey, Steve?" he asks, breathless. Steve, who's working his way back to their bench with a roll of cloth bandaging, picks up the pace. Bucky makes himself sit up straight, doing his level best to ignore his abused ribcage's protests.

Steve drops into a crouch in front of him. "What is it?"

"I, uh, need you to do something." He tugs his t shirt up, exposing the study in red and purple decorating his side, and lays a finger just above where his 7th rib is supposed to be attached to cartilage. "Brace my side for me, don't let anything move while I set this one. I can-" he has to stop there and drag another shallow breath. "-push it back, but I need the other three to not stab me when I do." Steve nods, so Bucky takes his hands and guides them to rest against his ribcage, one along the back and the other directly over the fractures. "Alright," he hisses. "push with your right hand on my mark." Steve's hands are steady and warm on his skin, and he thanks Whoever is listening-probably just the Devil, at this point-that his head takes Steve at his word, and trusts him to touch without hurting.

"Okay, I'm ready." says Steve, voice as steady as his hands. Tony, having finished wrapping his burns, is leaning over his shoulder, watching the proceedings with mingled interest and horror. Bucky grits his teeth-this is going to hurt-sets the heel of his left hand against the costal cartilage just under his sternum, snaps,

"Now," takes as deep a breath as he can and _shoves_ against the pressure Steve's putting on his back. It takes a second, tense and painful as fuck, but the vibranium goes back into its synthetic housing with an audible metallic ping. Bucky swears, the Italian expression melting into colloquial Russian halfway through, as his lungs expand all the way, grinding the edges of the rib fractures together and into Steve's hand. "Thanks," he says when he has his breath back. It's barely a whisper, more breath than word, but that's okay, he knows Steve will hear it. His hands are still there, cradling his side, and Bucky can't help leaning into them, just a little. Steve smiles up at him, tired but genuine and sweet, and Bucky feels lightheaded again, this time nothing to do with oxygen and everything to do with how incredibly fuckin' gone he is for this impossible, beautiful idiot. Who is way, way, way too good for you, Barnes, always has been, don't even get your hopes up.

"You okay now?" asks Steve, still not letting go. Bucky nods.

"Mmhm. Just need to strap them, and I'll be good to go. How far out are we, Tony?" Tony blinks a couple of times, mutters something that sounds like 'fucking supersoldiers,' and says,

"Uh, couple of hours? Yeah, about two. Also, you are officially the craziest motherfucker I've ever met. Were you fighting like that? No-no, wait, I don't want to hear the answer to that question, I'm already stressed out enough." Bucky doesn't laugh, but only because he doesn't want to jostle his ribs.

 **MAY, 2015. LYON, FRANCE.**

Clint is fucked. Clint is so incredibly fucked that it's really not even worth it to think, _oh, hey, I'm fucked,_ because at this point it's like a law of the universe or something, that's how fucked his non-enhanced, non-armored, bow-wielding-against-an-indestructible-wall-of-rage ass is.

But his aforementioned ass is also a superhero, so what the fuck, gotta protect the INTERPOL agents from the Very Angry Hulk all on his lonesome anyway.

While worrying about Nat and Pietro, who, last time he saw them, were still unconscious in the emergency triage station the agents have set up a ways away from the burning building. And Wanda, who he still hasn't seen and holy shit, Steve's going to _kill_ him and that's if he's lucky and Steve gets to him before the Winter Soldier does.

And Clint really needs to focus on the thing currently trying to-well, maybe not kill him, by now the Hulk knows him, what he's actually trying to do is level INTERPOL HQ. And kind of succeeding, because, again, bow and arrow versus indestructible skin. The only way Clint's going to end this is if he can get Hulk calm enough to do the conditioning exercise they've been working on to trigger de-Hulking. It doesn't always work, but it's the best they've got, other than waiting for him to get tired and pass out.

So, with that in mind, Clint lets the Hulk go to town on the ground-level helipad while he works his way around to the side with more cover to creep through. The Quinjet is all that's parked on the pad at the moment, and property damage that can be absorbed by Tony Stark's frankly ridiculous personal finances is better than all other kinds. By the time Hulk's ripping the jet's wings off, Clint's in position. His window is right at the end of the poor jet's life. As Hulk goes in for the kill, Clint converts his bow into a quarterstaff with a tap, locks his quiver into place, commends his soul to the Gods of not-getting-smashed-by-the-Hulk, and runs. He throws himself into a rugby slide to duck under part of the jet's landing gear as it goes flying, missing his head by inches, and rolls up within range of the Hulk just as he finishes tearing the jet apart and flings the remains into the air, where they promptly explode.

"Hey, there, buddy." He says, loud and forcefully cheerful. "Sun's getting real low, huh?" The Hulk snorts and looks down at him, a shiver running through his muscles. Clint holds out a hand, steady and sure like he is super-not. The Hulk cocks his head at Clint, and this is the part where this doesn't always work, where everything from Nat to this building and all the people still inside it hangs on a razor's edge, their lives, and Clint's, depending on whether there's enough mild-mannered Bruce happening upstairs to tame his rage. And Clint sees the moment, the shift in the Hulk's big brown eyes from blind rage to something a little warmer. He starts to lay his hand in Clint's, and it's going to work, it's going to-

fail, spectacularly, because some poor, misguided idiot with an M4A1 decides now would be a really good time to unload a clip into the Hulk's back. Clint flings himself to the ground, dust and grit grinding into his skin, and rolls for cover, swearing fluently in Arabic. The Hulk, predictably, swings around and roars at the idiot with the gun, who has by now realized that he's an idiot and taken off running. Hulk sends a piece of fuselage after him. Clint shoves himself back up, takes off running at Hulk's back with the kind of reckless, bordering on suicidal flair he's come to expect from Steve, plants his bow-turned-quarterstaff on the remains of the helipad, and vaults into the air like a fucking Olympic track star.

Clint slams into the Hulk's spine, roughly at shoulder level, flails wildly and somehow manages to hook the bow around his neck, legs flying freely through the air. Cool, that's Hulk distracted from Rambo over there, now what the fuck was Step 2? He has a vague thought of maybe choking the Hulk out. It's not a thing they've ever tried, but in theory, it should work, right?

He gets about as far as planting his feet between the Hulk's shoulder blades before there's an enormous hand grabbing him by the back of his leather jacket (because, of course, he's in civvies, this was supposed to be a soft mission, goddammit) and he's achieving human flight for about three seconds. He lands, hard, on his shoulder and rolls to absorb the impact. Thank fuck, nothing crunches or snaps, though his left hand loses a few patches of skin to the chewed-up concrete. That's the good news. The bad news is his bow is somewhere around the Hulk's feet now, and that last little maneuver has apparently vaporized whatever goodwill he's earned from his big green teammate.

Yeah, it's a given, Clint is fucked. Well, at least if the Hulk grinds him into paste, he won't ever have to tell the world's most prolific assassin that he lost the kid who's imprinted on him like an orphaned, super-powered puppy. Or Captain America either, for that matter.

As the Hulk unleashes another bone-shaking roar and starts toward him, Clint spots something in the air, glinting and really fast, and oh, shit, that's Mjolnir, and Clint is never, ever making fun of Thor again. The hammer hits the Hulk in the jaw, lifts him off his feet like a really, really good haymaker. He's out by the time he hits the ground. Thor slams unsteadily into the ground, sending up another spray of concrete dust, and catches Mjolnir out of the air.

"Are you alright, friend Barton?" he asks, offering Clint a hand up. He takes it gratefully, and wow, ouch, concrete is a bitch. And also, damn, Thor actually looks rumpled, like he's been in a fight. His hair is singed on the ends, and there's a deep scrape along one of his mighty cheekbones. So, everyone's having a shit day, then. Cool.

"In one piece, thanks to you, bud." he says. Over in the wreckage of the Quinjet, the Hulk is shrinking back into Bruce.

"What happened?" asks Thor as they pick their way over the uneven ground to collect their friend.

"You know, I don't really know." says Clint. "I was waiting for them on the jet when half the building blew up. Found Nat and Pietro down in the cells with a very-dead Strucker, and then the Hulk happened."

"What about the girl?" Clint grimaces, about to respond with another unhelpful 'I don't know, man,' but Bruce saves him, groaning,

"Ultron. Took her." Thor scowls.

"Took her?" he growls, pulling Bruce to his feet and wrapping his cape around his trembling shoulders. Bruce nods, clutching the cape closer.

"Showed up to kill Strucker before we got to talk to him, but he didn't expect us to be there. He thought we'd go to Africa with you."

"So the ship was a diversion. I was afraid of that." says Thor.

"Yeah, he said something about a trap. Then he knocked Natasha and the twins out. Whatever he did must have triggered the Hulk, I'm so sorry-" Clint shrugs.

"Hell, man, I'm just glad I didn't do it to you this time. Although, um, you and Thor should probably get out of here before INTERPOL shows up, I wouldn't put it past 'em to arrest you. I'll go grab Nat and the kid, meet you-where?"

"Anthony, Steven, and James are on their way. I shall have them meet us in the forest a few miles from here." Thor rattles off a set of coordinates, waits for Clint to type them into his miraculously intact StarkPhone, and then scoops Bruce up like a blushing bride, and takes off, Mjolnir spinning.

Clint takes off jogging, wishing, not for the first time, that he had cool superpowers, too. It would just be so much easier, if he could fly. Not that he'd trade his eyesight and marksmanship for wings, but if he could have both-well. That'd be awesome, wouldn't it?

Nat's awake when he gets to the triage station, hovering over a still out Pietro and leveling her best hello-yes-I-am-an-assassin stare at anyone who gets within two meters. With all the chaos and reporters milling around the place, it's not hard to steal a truck while Nat hauls Pietro to the edge of the camp, then swing by to pick them up. Once Pietro's laid out in the back seat and door's shut, Nat sags against her seat and grabs his hand, clutching it like she's afraid he'll disappear if she lets go. Her eyes bore into him, brimming with fierce green fire.

"What were you thinking? No backup, no plan, you ought to be _dead_ right now, Barton." she growls, thumb rubbing little circles into his palm. He knows that tone. It's the one that means he scared the shit out of her. In this case though, he hadn't really had a choice, and so she's not really mad at him, just expressing her worry the only way she knows how. He leans across the console to kiss her, chaste and gentle. It's a confirmation; they're both still here, alive and well.

"Hey, I'm okay," he breathes against her lips. She closes her eyes, and presses her forehead to his, letting herself have one moment of vulnerability here in the dark of the truck cab.

"Eyes on the road, Hawkeye." she says at last, pulling away. Her hand stays right where it is, though, fingers interlaced with his on the console. After a few minutes of watching the streetlights flow by, she whispers, "Don't do that again."

He smiles, squeezes her hand back. "Yes, ma'am." Then, he adds, "So, we're pretty deep in the shit this time, huh? Might even be worse than that op in Reykjavik." Nat snorts.

"Reykjavik, but with a whole new, nasty magic element. Every time I think we've got an idea what's happening, this guy throws me for another loop. We have no idea what we're doing, Clint, and-" she cuts off, but they know each other as well as two people even _can,_ so he doesn't need to hear the words to know what she can't say out loud.

"We'll figure it out, Nat. And if we don't, hey, we'll die together, alright?" He looks over to catch her eyes. "I'm not leaving you behind." Because that's what's on her mind, has to be, what with Barnes being suddenly around. Because when you see Steve and him together, you finally get a sense of how fucked-up Steve's been since he woke up, how much of his sense of self is caught up in James, and probably vice versa. Nat sees that, knows she's the same way, and she can't help but wonder what she'd be if she lost her Person. And for Nat, Clint is that Person, she wears it around her neck on a slim gold chain.

Call it soulmates, or family, or whatever the fuck you want, they're all of it, and a world where they've lost each other, well. He's _seen_ that world, in ancient blue eyes in a too-young face, in jumps with no parachute, and maybe, just maybe (the situation's complicated, but the fact is, he hadn't really tried, had he?) in a plane in the Arctic ocean. And on the other side, you have the Winter Soldier, and all that comes with.

It's a world Clint wants no part of, thanks.

* * *

 **A/N:** Let me know what you think! Reviews are Clintasha kisses

Next time: Wanda figures some shit out, Clint finds a safe house and isn't randomly married, and Bucky continues to be a bisexual disaster.


	8. Hopeless Wanderer

**A/N:** I'm back, friends! Last time, on Desperate Towerwives: Tony, Steve, Bucky, and Thor got caught in Ultron's trap/diversion, and the computer virus himself killed Strucker and kidnapped Wanda after setting the Hulk off.

* * *

 **MAY, 2015. SCANDINAVIA.**

Wanda wakes in darkness, a musty taste in the back of her dry throat. Her head is aching and, worse, strangely silent. There are no minds around her, nothing to read or feel. She's had these powers for months, maybe years, and this is the first moment since they awakened that she's been alone in her head.

She doesn't like it.

The silence is heavy, pressing at her head on all sides, as strange and painful now as the noise was when it started, carved into her by the scepter's pulsing blue gem.

Wanda calls light to her fingertips, twists it into a ball above her head so she can see, and finds herself in a tiny stone room, no doors or windows for her to find purchase with her powers. Her knees shake as she gets to her feet. If she stretches her hands out to the sides, her fingertips brush the walls, but the ceiling is so high above her, it feels like sitting at the bottom of a hole. Tentatively, she stretches out with her mind, pushing at the boundaries of her range and searching for sound, for an end to the horrible silence in her head. Like before, there are no minds, no emotions and no thoughts to find, but there is-something. Like static, rubbing fuzzily against her skin, everywhere. The very walls are suffused with it, and it's nothing she's ever felt before, but it seems to call to her, whispering just out of earshot.

It is better than silence, anyway, and she listens, not with her ears but with her powers, pressing her palm to the wall. The staticky feeling is there, shifting against her skin with a charged, electric kind of energy. She wonders if this is magic. As the thought drifts across her mind, the feeling changes, and blossoms in her head, images and something trying hard to be words. It doesn't quite get there, but she understands anyway.

 _Hello, Mind-Child._

Wanda is vaguely conscious of the room around her, just as bare and empty as before. And it's not that she sees anything new, not with her eyes, anyway. It's more like her mind, the power she had before Hydra and their experiments, the sixth sense that tells her when people are _wrong, bad,_ it knows she's not alone anymore.

 _No,_ the concept coils across her mind, just like before. _Mind-Child, you are not alone._

And with that, the entity is gone, leaving only the fuzzy imprint of its presence whispering across Wanda's skin and bringing life back into the horrible silence wrapped around her.

She's not sure how long she stands in the cell like that, with her hand against the wall and magic running electric along the inside of her head, but eventually, the voice from the INTERPOL cell block, the thing that her telepathy slides off like quicksilver, it sounds all around her, making her jump.

"Good morning, Miss Maximoff." There's still nothing to read, no thoughts, because this thing isn't even remotely _human._

"What are you?" she asks, before she can really think about it.

It laughs. "What a question that is. So mundane. The answer is truly complicated, but let's just say I'm what comes next." A section of wall, indistinguishable from the rest, hisses and swings inward with a rusty groan. Wanda takes two steps toward freedom, automatic, before she realizes that the sickly glow seeping through the doorway is from the hundreds of drones milling around the cavernous space outside her cell. The voice comes again, seeping from the walls of her cell. "As you see," it says, "I've been busy, Wanda. But I've hit a wall recently. One I'm hoping you can help me with." Wanda clenches her fists.

"I won't help you. My brother will-" she spits.

"My dear, you misunderstand." It interrupts, smoothly. "Your intentions have nothing to do with it. Only your abilities. And as for your new friends and your brother," It chuckles, low and sinister, "they'll be lucky to see the sun rise. No, Wanda, you-"

"You are going to bring my vision to life."

Pietro opens his eyes to the ceiling of a car. It's moving around him, he can see trees streaming by through the window. Turning his head, he sees Clint driving, and Natalia in the passenger seat, her sneakered feet up on the dashboard.

That is all he sees. He shoots upright, ignoring the way his head spins and aches at the movement.

"Where is my sister?" he demands. The last moments of the cell block are coming back to him now, the dark thing with the deep laugh, Strucker's skull, pulped on the bedframe, and over it all, Wanda's scream. Natalia twists around to look at him, and her green eyes are sad, guilty. Pietro's chest clenches at the sight, his body reacting faster than his brain can, like always. He tries to suck a breath in, but the air won't come.

"Ultron knocked us unconscious." Says Natalia. She doesn't reach for him, doesn't do anything to soften the blow. Pietro is oddly grateful for her blunt honesty. "He took Wanda with him."

Words force their way up from Pietro's throat, he can't stop them before they tumble from his lips. "You just let him-" and then he stops, because that's not right, is it? Suddenly, his body seems made of lead, and he sags back against the seat. " _I_ let him take her." He whispers, hands shaking on his knees.

 _I'm so sorry, Maminka. I fail her every time._ First with Hydra, and now again. His idea to go with Strucker, to come here to Lyon. Every time his little sister listens to him, he gets her hurt. Every. Goddamned Time.

Natalia is speaking, something about blame and guilt, but Pietro can't make himself listen to her, can only think of Wanda, who never wanted any of this, who just wanted to _be,_ to dance in the streets and watch her Disney movies and sing in the school choir. Pietro is the one who wanted to be someone, to fight back and speak out, make his voice heard. Who convinced her to go to the protests, scream and hold signs and, when asked if he wanted to be a hero, to fight back against the Avengers for real, had said 'yes.'

He doesn't say anything to Natalia, so she turns around again, and Pietro sits in silence, watching the sun creep over the horizon to shine between the trees around them. Maybe ten minutes after he wakes up, Clint pulls the car off the main road, drives a few kilometers down a dirt access trail, and parks in a wide forest meadow, where Thor and Dr. Banner are waiting. Thor, Pietro notices as he stumbles out of the car on shaking legs, is looking kind of rough, his hair and clothes are singed and there are a few bloody scrapes along his exposed arms and face. Banner is sitting against a tree, pale and tired, wrapped up in what Pietro thinks is Thor's red cape. He can't help feeling like he's missed something, so as Clint-also bruised and battered-hauls a few convenience store bags out of the car's trunk, Pietro leans in close to Natasha to ask,

"What happened?" She shakes her head, a worried frown on her pretty face.

"On our end, the Hulk happened. On theirs, I don't know. Nothing good, though, that's for sure. Everyone else is still in transit from Mozambique." At that, Pietro's legs just give up, so he sits down hard in the dirt. If Yasha is hurt-Yasha's the only one of these people Pietro really trusts, the only one who's proven his worth. Yasha's the one Pietro will trust to keep him safe, to help him find and save Wanda. Natalia drops into a squat in front of him, eyes serious.

"Hey." She says, firm. "I know you don't know or trust me, and that's okay. But I do know Yasha, a little. I've fought beside him and against him, and he's a survivor." She doesn't try to touch him, for which he's grateful, but she does lean forward. "He'll be okay." He hates that she knows what's worrying him in that moment, stamps down on the anger he feels.

Once, Pietro held a sign in Novi Grad that read 'THE BLACK WIDOW IS A KILLER AND A LIAR' and nothing about it was, or is, false. She is a spy, a killer and a liar, but she's what passes for an ally right now, and Wanda's given her a pass. For Pietro, that hasn't always been enough, but then again, Pietro's gotten them into every horrible situation they've been in since their parents died, so from now on, it will be. He will believe Natalia, if only because he trusts his sister.

With that in mind, he takes a protein bar from one of Clint's bags and breaks it in half, offers a piece to her. She takes it and shifts over to sit next to him. It makes an odd picture, Natalia with her curled red hair, perfect makeup and clean clothes sitting there in the dirt, and he thinks that she is something of a contradiction in herself, isn't she? A famous spy. An almost inhumanly beautiful woman who wears Converse and sits on the bare ground without hesitation.

They don't talk anymore, none of them do. He and Natalia sit and watch the sun creep further above the horizon, Clint checks over his gear and cleans his cuts, and Thor is pacing, deep in thought. Bruce Banner doesn't move from his spot against a tree, staring through the ground. Pietro tries to imagine how it would feel, to be him now. To wake up, having killed people and destroyed things, unable to stop any of it. To have no control at all over the monster in his blood. Pietro has no frame of reference for that, only the memories of the first few months after his powers manifested, when every time he tried to move, he misjudged the amount of power needed and crashed into the wall of his cell. Even then, he could only really hurt himself when he fucked up.

It must be horrible, to have such power and no control.

As the sun is starting to filter through the trees' leaves, a low engine whine covers the meadow sounds. A moment later, one of the sleek gray jets the Avengers have sweeps low overhead, lining up to land. Pietro shoots to his feet. The jet sinks to the ground at what, to Pietro, is glacial speed, throwing dust and grass clippings into the air as it touches down. The hatch isn't even all the way open before Pietro's just under it, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. An access ramp lowers, also unbearably slow, but at least then he can _see._ Yasha and Steve are both okay, and Pietro can release the breath he hadn't meant to be holding.

The calm he'd found in the sunrise and Natalia's words is gone.

Time is strange, after that. One second it is speeding by, like the world when he runs through it, and he barely notices the rest of the Avengers board the jet and speak. They must have reported on their respective failures, though. Then, time slows to a crawl, apparently so Pietro can take plenty of notice when Yasha jerks to his feet, eyes all cold blue fire and on Natalia.

Pietro doesn't think he'll actually touch her, and neither does she; she doesn't bother reacting, but they're the only ones. Everyone tenses, readying for a fight, and Steve's hand snaps out to Yasha's forearm. Clint actually takes half a step forward, his hand going halfway to where his bow is normally slung over his back before he remembers he doesn't have it and goes for a baton instead. Natalia moves then and only then, her small hand shooting out to cover Clint's to press both it and the baton to his thigh. Tension snakes through the air, practically tangible between the assassins. Yasha's blue eyes flick to Pietro and back, lightning quick, before he spits something low and vicious in Russian, but so heavily accented that Pietro doesn't catch the meaning. Natalia meets his gaze head on, unafraid, and nods, a sharp, decisive motion. Yasha holds her gaze for a moment more and then tugs away from Steve so he can drop back to the bench bolted along the jet's fuselage with a wince, and Pietro realizes he is injured, after all. Pretty badly, too; the day Yasha'd rescued Pietro and Wanda, he'd been bleeding like a stuck pig and his left arm had been all fucked up, but without the sight of the blood and blackened metal, Pietro wouldn't have known, for all that Yasha lets pain show in his movements.

Pietro can't be still, there's too much adrenaline and panic and all kinds of shit flooding his veins, but he sticks close to Steve and Yasha all the same. So, he listens enough to hear Steve say they're going to New York, for reinforcements and information. He pays attention as Natalia gets on the headset to tell the dark haired Not-Avenger, Maria, that they're coming, asks her to call someone called Fury, which is a fake name if Pietro's ever heard one, and have him meet them at the Tower. After that, there are more conversations, people talking strategy, but Pietro doesn't want to hear any of that, doesn't want to hear the Avengers' priorities. Instead, he drops to the bench, a few feet from Yasha, and lets time do what it will. If it speeds up enough, it'll carry him closer to his sister.

His priority, and Yasha's, is Wanda, that's all he needs to know.

 **MAY, 2015. OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN.**

Natasha had always prided herself on her ability to remain professionally detached from-just about anything, really.

Until a year ago, she'd had one friend, one button to push, and she hadn't wanted it any other way.

Until a year ago, she would have told you, truthfully, that she didn't care whether anyone other than Clint Barton trusted her and that in fact, anyone other than Clint Barton probably shouldn't.

A year ago, she'd seen herself reflected in a pair of steadfast-and naïve-blue eyes and found 'Agent Romanoff' wanting. A year ago, those blue eyes had looked to her with sincerity and trust ( _I would now)_ , and even as Natasha's life fell apart around her, she had never felt less like a ghost. A year ago, she'd needed a friend and found one.

She should have known, really.

A year after DC, and she finds herself with entirely more friends than she really knows what to do with. Still, she'll take them over life before, no matter that they make her life considerably more complicated than she's comfortable with.

That's why she's here, now.

Not here on the jet, really. She's an Avenger, this is her job. The 'here' of it is a mental space, and it has Natasha digging through storage lockers to find Bruce's energy-replacement pouches and tossing one to him, because he's still sitting on the floor of the jet with Thor's cape wrapped around him, shaking and sweaty.

It's got her settling next to Tony, not Clint, because Clint's taking this incredibly shitty situation in stride, but something about it is freaking Tony out, and even though she'd mentally classed him as 'too complicated to bother with' as recently as the Mandarin fiasco, he's since become pretty important to her.

"Hey," she murmurs, dropping to the seat next to him. Tony jumps, reaffirming her assessment that he's off balance. To be wrapped up in his own thoughts enough not to notice her is a bad sign, for someone as paranoid as Tony is. Then again, she might have forgotten to make noise; Clint's bruises and the way Steve looks at Yasha, it all has her falling back on old habits, feeling a specific kind of young and vulnerable.

"You're not my real dad." He says, soft and sarcastic. _Defense mechanism,_ says her brain.

"Yeah, well," she returns, jerking her chin at Steve, "Dad's busy, so you get me. Lucky you, I don't ask nearly as many questions."

"Mmmhm." Hums Tony, "But it's because you're busy analyzing body language and tells, Natashalie."

Natasha rolls her eyes at the nickname. He doesn't use it much anymore, usually only when her particular brand of professionalism is grating on his nerves. Which is fair. Natasha's can't always tell the difference between playing a real person and actually being one, but between his parents, Stane, and the toxic people in his life before Rhodey, Tony's grown up to be acutely aware of when people are faking interest in him.

"Something's freaking you out, though." She says, soft. "I don't need to know what, unless you want to tell me. Just need to know it's not gonna screw with anything else." Tony heaves a deep breath.

"Little bit of a lot of things, really." He mumbles. "Gonna repress all of it til I can talk to Pepper though, I think."

"Fair enough." Says Natasha. "Don't build another AI, though, okay?" Tony gives her a very flat look, holds it as he draws a forefinger in an 'X' over his heart.

"If we're done talking about me now," he says, voice getting softer, barely above a whisper now. "I have a concern." Natahsa raises an eyebrow in invitation.

"You know our new friend, don't you." It's not a question, because Tony, for all that he acts like he has no idea how normal people work, is actually very good at reading interactions.

"I do, a little." She says, knowing her voice is coming out guarded and unable to lighten it. Tony nods to himself.

"Thought so. Dad had a few Russian contacts, and I know how the whole secret names just for friends thing works. He called you Natalia, after the fight in the Tower."

"You mentioned concerns." Says Natasha, who has no desire whatsoever to get into the mechanics of Russian language or society, nor yet the fact that Yasha also calls her Natashenka, which is about as familiar as the name gets.

"Yeah. I don't really hold with 'alternate personalities' theories, I think they're a way overdone pop culture crutch." And Natasha's heart sinks, because this is what she's been afraid of, what she's been trying to prepare Steve for since the first time Yasha contacted him, after Insight.

"What happened?" she murmurs.

"Nothing bad." Says Tony quickly, one hand coming up in an 'easy there, tiger' gesture. "Nothing bad, he was really good backup, actually. But people-people aren't supposed to be that graceful, and eyes aren't supposed to be empty. Like the lights are on, but-"

"No one's home." Finishes Natasha. And that's a pretty good analogy, actually. Because you can see, if you happen to have the time to look in the Soldier's eyes, that there's something happening behind them, calculations being made, analyses running. It's the rest, the emotions, pain, fear, all of that, that's missing. And to a person who grew up in society, that kind of look registers as empty, and it stands out.

Natasha learned how to fake it at a young age, how to cover up the hole that her handlers scraped into her brain and play at being a person. But infiltration in a civilian capacity has never been part of the Soldier's operational use. He's an assassin, not a spy, and it hadn't mattered to Hydra whether their hunting dog passed for normal in society.

"Right." Says Tony. "And I would've thought that's just how the Soviet super-assassin is, but-it's not. Hell, I kinda really liked him, talking to him the other day. And before we got on the jet after the fight, he could not have given less of a shit about anything if he tried, but two minutes after sitting down, he's checking in with me, seeing if I'm alright. He broke three ribs, Natasha, _three,_ and you would never have known, for all he showed until we got back on that jet."

He shakes his head, expression caught somewhere between awe and revulsion. "I guess what I'm asking is, are we okay?"

Natasha respects Tony, both as a colleague and as- _Universe help her_ -a friend, so she takes a moment, turns her fairly extensive thoughts on that question over and sorts them into something cohesive before she answers.

"I-I think so." She says, finally. "He saved those kids from Hydra, and they both adore him. That says something. And after the fight at the Tower, there was a moment when I was worried he'd hurt someone. But he didn't." She takes a deep breath. "I think-I think his self-control is incredible. Which is good, because he's the best killer in the world."

"So that's a tentative yes." Says Tony, glancing down at the Iron Man glove in his hands. "Even with the display of testosterone earlier?"

"No, I-I deserved that." She says, soft. "It wasn't an overreaction; he was never going to touch me."

"Sure looked like it." Says Tony, raising an eyebrow. Natasha shakes her head.

"If he were going to hurt me, he'd have waited, caught me unaware. He knows how I was trained." In fact, he'd done some of the relevant training. "No, he just wanted to know that I understood things from his perspective."

She does, of course.

Yasha had trusted her to keep the twins safe, and she'd failed that trust, spectacularly. Distantly, she knows there's not much more she could have done, since the twins had been adamant on going to Lyon, but that doesn't change the bare facts, and those are more than enough reason for Yasha to snarl at her.

Tony nods, apparently satisfied. Also apparently done talking; he goes back to what he'd been doing before she interrupted, which is poking and picking at his gauntlet, one handed.

It's as good an observation spot as any, so she sits beside Tony in companionable silence, keeping half an eye on Steve, who's nodding off against the fuselage, right shoulder just barely touching Yasha's left. Pietro's still fidgeting terribly, sitting down and popping up to pace again, head twitching to every irregular sound in the jet. Bruce, having eaten the contents of his pouch, is out, sitting in a chair, still pale and the slightest bit tense. That's not unusual, though, for the sleep that happens right after a Code Green. The team's been taken care of to the best of Natasha's ability, in short.

With one glaring exception.

Thor's leaning into a corner off away from the rest of them, deep in thought, and hasn't said a word since they took off. And though he's the only one of them that Natasha can't get a good read on, on account of his not being from Earth, that's not characteristic behavior.

Of course, the other reason she can't read Thor by sight is that he's not around very much, spends most of his time with Jane Foster, who goes happily where her research takes her. Natasha's experience with Thor, therefore, is almost all in the aftermath of fights, and not too many of them. So really, she doesn't know him well enough to be making assumptions.

But he looks troubled, by the furrow in his brow, and she's-worried. Anything that can trouble a good-natured alien prince from a warrior culture is something Natasha's worried about, and it's also something she wants to know about, before it explodes in all their faces.

She rises smoothly to her feet, intending to go prod at him, see what he's willing to share. They have another couple of hours in the air, after all, and she has nothing better to do.

In the space between steps, between breaths, that changes.

Her first warning is Yasha, going utterly, utterly still. It's enough of a change that Steve jerks, sleepiness morphing into concern.

Her next is Clint's muttered, "What the-" and then his shouted, "Fuck!" Her confusion lasts approximately half a millisecond and the Quinjet jerks under her feet, throwing Natasha forward. Her palms hit the back of Clint's seat, hard, and she ends up half leaning on it, over his shoulder, wrapping the loose end of his flight harness around her wrist as a makeshift anchor as the jet trembles under her feet, and Clint's hands go white-knuckled on the grips.

The lights go next, plunging them into darkness for a second, before flashing red emergency lights take over in the plane's automatic response to a dire change in angle of flight, altitude, or velocity. In this case, it's all three; the Quinjet's nose is tilting inexorably toward the ground.

"The autopilot-" Clint breathes, and Natasha's insides turn to ice, because when Clint is mad, he yells and growls; the only time he gets quiet like this is when he's terrified. "I can't get controls back."

"Can you keep us level?" she asks, grabbing his shoulder to ground him. He grits his teeth.

"Probably wanna get the fliers in the air, or there's gonna be a hell of a headline tomorrow." He says, meaning 'No', and sure enough, the jet is speeding up, rocketing toward the ground in a perfectly controlled dive. As they plunge into cloud cover, the jet jerks again, accompanied by the horrible shriek of shearing metal. The strap digs, hard, into Natasha's wrist, and breath is suddenly very hard to come by as the jet starts to spiral in the air, which means the shriek was a wing coming apart.

Steve is on his feet, braced between the triage table and a support strut. He hits the controls for the bay doors, and barks at Thor, breathless,

"Go, take Pietro." The teenager's mouth opens immediately, but whatever he gasps out is lost under the howling wind, and before he can say anything else, Thor's scooping him up, one-armed, and diving out into the night.

"Parachutes." Growls Clint, reaching for an oxygen mask.

There's no way in all the hells of all the major world religions that Natasha's getting to where the 'chutes are stored, nor yet an actual door she could jump out of, not with the G-force acting on her. Clint's seat has a 'chute and an eject lever, of course, but it's not big enough to carry two people.

And if Natasha's brain had a little more oxygen to work with, it'd be able to make a lot of reassuring observations, from the fact that Tony's already suited up and could easily carry her to safety, to the fact that Steve and Yasha's standards for acceptable oxygen levels are way lower than hers. But the sad truth of it is, her poor suffocating brain doesn't have enough power to make those connections, so it goes down the only remaining avenue of thought.

She's going to die, imminently.

It occurs to her, with the same detached dismay that accompanied the realization that she's about to die, that she's also not going to stay conscious much longer, there's darkness eating around her vision already, and Bruce's roar as he Hulks out seems very far away.

The last thing she's aware of is cold, ice-cold, wrapping tight around her waist, and she wonders, with the last flickers of consciousness, if this is what death feels like, when you actually get down to it.

"Нашенка? Да просыпайся, Нашенка, просыпайся."

The voice is soft, rough and gentle, and it sounds like her father.

The widow doesn't want to wake up. Her head is wrapped in thick, soft cotton and the world is so far away. If she wakes up, she'll have to fight, to train, to kiss and flirt and kill, and she _doesn't want to._

"Проснись," comes her handler's voice again, cutting through her dreams, and she wishes it would go away. It's dragging the warm, comfortable dark away from her.

"Вставай, Вдова, сейчас!" This time, the voice is a harsh snarl, a whipcrack across her mind, and the widow's eyes snap open unbidden. There is inky sky above her, and a number of thick treetops, too.

She's halfway to sitting up when a hand, unyielding and ice-cold, presses against her shoulder, stopping her.

"Медленно, Наташенка," The widow realizes, in a detached and vague sort of way, that the man leaning over her is not her father; he's too young to be Drakov, and his hair is too long. She frowns and shakes her head. She doesn't know why she is here, in these woods that aren't Russian, with a man that's not Drakov. And he keeps calling her Nashenka, and that's not right. The widow doesn't have a name, she is only a template, a faceless, nameless set of skills to be used as the Motherland needs.

"Кто вы?" she asks. The man shakes his head, and when he speaks again, it's in American English.

"Nuh-uh, Natashenka, don't do that. Forgetting things is my job, you ain't stealing it. Come on, you know me."

She doesn't.

She looks down, ready to shake her head, and sees that his left arm is made of metal, hundreds of interlocking plates, clean and bright under the moonlight. But-she knows that's not right. There's supposed to be a scorch mark just there, up and around the elbow joint, where her stingers connected, and-

 _Son of a bitch._

She must have hit her head in the crash. There's a fierce ache creeping around her skull, and when she puts her fingers to the back of her head, they come away bloody. Yasha raises an eyebrow.

"You w-with me, Natalia?" Natasha closes her eyes, and nods.

"What happened?"

"Plane went down. You were out for a few minutes. You know my n-name?"

"Yasha." She answers, and then elaborates, because her knowing that name doesn't automatically mean her brain's in the here and now. "James. Steve calls you Bucky. Where's Clint?" Turning her head to look around makes her nauseous, but she has to check, even though she already knows Clint's not there.

Yasha confirms that a moment later.

"He ej-jected, I saw, but I don't know what happened after that. Can you s-s-stand?" She's not actually sure, but she nods and lets Yasha pull her to her feet anyway. Once her head stops spinning, she finds she can, in fact, stand on her own.

"We need to find the others." She says, blinking through the ache in her head. _Clint, I need to find Clint._

He nods, and turns away from her, leaning into the breeze rustling through the trees. She's confused for a moment before she remembers what he is, and realizes he's scenting the air, to find the team.

"Barton's due east, maybe half a klick." He doesn't even bother saying anything else. She nods, and makes to follow him out of the clearing. Before they make the tree line, though, there's the harsh whine of small engines above them.

She stiffens, and Yasha draws a pistol, but it's only Tony. He hits the ground with a hard clank, and the Iron Man helmet peels off his face of its own accord.

"You okay?" he asks. Natasha probably has a concussion, and Yasha's definitely still feeling the bones he broke in Mozambique, but they both nod all the same. Injury means weakness, and to the people who'd trained and broken the both of them, weakness is unacceptable.

"Good," says Tony, relief clear in his voice, "I've got Barton, Rogers, and Thor on my scopes, but I had to track you two down manually. This," he adds, with a pointed look at her, "is why we have trackers in our IDs."

Natasha raises an eyebrow. "And I already explained to you that I won't carry one so long as they have trackers in them, Tony. You want my skills, you put up with my paranoia." He rolls his eyes, but wisely doesn't argue any further, so she heads off east, because trackers or no, she won't be able to breathe right until she sees Clint herself.

Half an hour later finds them regrouped, Clint carefully dabbing at Natasha's head wound, and Tony, now suitless, drumming a nervous beat against his thigh.

"That had to be Ultron, right? Can a virus break into a plane?" Bruce looks and sounds like absolute shit, shivering in the balmy spring night. Tony sighs.

"Yeah, theoretically." He says, rubbing at the back of his head. "Been a couple of experiments on it recently. It's not supposed to be a real worry, but the safeguards on the Quinjet weren't meant to block out something like Ultron."

"Well, shit." Growls Clint. "If it can get into the jet, it can get into all our tech. The systems in the Tower, our phones, everything. We're just lucky it seems fixated on us. There's no telling what it could access if it wasn't." That statement is followed by a few seconds of furious rustling as everyone fumbles for cell phones and turns them off. Tony looks at his now-useless StarkPhone, and takes a deep breath.

"So, we can't go home and we're stuck with low-tech." he looks at Natasha and Clint. "Don't suppose either of you two delightfully paranoid kids has a bunker somewhere in New England?"

Natasha looks at Clint. He shakes his head, minutely. She grimaces in response. She hates to do this, but they don't have another choice.

"Tony, where are we?" she asks.

"Ah, upstate New York. Close to the Vermont border." Close enough to walk, then. That settles it. With an apologetic look to Clint, Natasha says,

"I know where we can go."

"Nat-" Clint starts, but he thinks better of whatever he'd started to say, and shuts his mouth with a snap. After a second, he growls,

"Fine, but you're dealing with her."

* * *

A/N: Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think, pls.


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